trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Review: G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy”
by David Gross — 2022-02-20T18:58:39.506Z

Several years ago I gushed and gushed about Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue. I’m not taking any of that gushing back today—I still think it was an exciting argument and one that has continued to resonate with me.

But I finally got around to reading G.E.M. Ans­combe’s essay “Mod­ern Mor­al Phil­os­o­phy,” which pre­dates Mac­Intyre’s book by two dec­ades, and I found that she had al­ready put for­ward much of the core of Mac­Intyre’s later ar­gu­ment there. Mac­Intyre only men­tions Ans­combe’s es­say in a brief paren­the­ti­cal in his book (in which he says that parts of his own ar­gu­ment are “both deeply in­debted to and rather dif­fer­ent from that of Ans­combe 1958”). To me it feels more like Mac­Intyre fur­ther elabo­ra­ted a pro­ject and a the­o­re­ti­cal frame­work that Ans­combe de­serves credit for estab­lish­ing.

I’ll try to summarize her 26-page argument in sixteen paragraphs, in the hopes of whetting your appetite for reading the whole thing:

Anscombe argues that concepts like “moral obligation,” “morally right and wrong,” and “the moral sense of ‘ought’ ” have lost their meaning. Such phrases “ought to be jettisoned” by philosophers “because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives” and so are now just confusing. (This is not because she is a moral nihilist—she’s about as far from that as you can get—but because she thinks philosophy has become hopelessly confused and needs to reset.)

She traces the term “moral” to Aristotle (if I remember right, Aristotle used ἠθικός which got translated into moralis in Latin). But because of how the meaning of “moral” has shifted over time, to read Aristotle in translation today means to “constantly feel like someone whose jaws have somehow got out of alignment: the teeth don’t come together in a proper bite.”

Words like “should”/“ought”/“needs” are used in two senses: First, to describe the requirements for things with purposes (this machinery needs oil, ought to be oiled, in order to function as it should); secondly, in the modern moral sense to indicate obligation. This second sense has a historical pedigree. Anscombe believes it resulted from the Judeo-Christian belief in divine law. Christianity borrowed terms from Greek philosophy and put a divine law spin on them, so that, for example, the Greek word for going astray or ...
Russian x-risks newsletter winter 21-22, war risks update. 
by avturchin — 2022-02-20T18:58:20.189Z

TL;DR: Ukraine will eventually either get nuclear protection by NATO or its own nukes, which in both cases will likely lead to the nuclear war with Russia. Knowing this, Putin may want to attack first or credibly threaten to do so.

The whole world is looking at the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Will it lead to nuclear war?

My general view is that the Ukraine-Russia conflict is structurally similar to the conflict between India and Pakistan. There are many differences, but it is a good reference point. Pakistan appeared after the British empire breakdown and it was a relatively new country whose borders was not well established. Kashmir is like Crimea in this conflict.

The bottom line of this analogy is that there will be many wars between Ukraine and Russia and that Ukraine will eventually become a nuclear power, the same way as Pakistan did, or will get similar military capabilities via drones and membership in NATO.

Putin also knows this and also knows that his large tank armies are almost obsolete. Therefore, he tries to limit future Ukraine military capabilities by attacking (or threatening) now. He does actually say this: we see Ukraine (in NATO) as an existential threat. He may also have some other irrational motives but the rational motives go beyond Putin, so any other Russian leader will be in the same strategic situation.

A nuclear war between Russia and Ukraine is rather possible from a long-term perspective, no matter how the current escalation will end. Unless the current war ends with the complete occupation of Ukraine.

Therefore, the real goal of the war may be taking (or permanently damaging) almost all Ukraine including all nuclear power stations and industrial capabilities. Personally, I do not think it will make Russia safer, as new military technologies (drones) will continue to evolve in other countries and Russia will be cut from new tech by enormous sanctions. In my view, the large war with Ukraine will end in large crimes and will be eventually lost because of international help.

Therefore, Putin may see the current moment as the only chance to stop future nuclear-protected Ukraine and to prevent a nuclear war with it.

Ukraine now is slowly developing medium-range missiles which can reach Moscow according to some accounts. ( Hrim-2 declared distance is 500 km, Poroshenko said 1000 km is possible.)

A rocket ...
Anticorrelated Noise Injection for Improved Generalization
by tailcalled — 2022-02-20T10:15:32.276Z

Just a study I saw on /r/MachineLearning: link.

Basically, one way of training neural networks is to add random noise during the training. Usually, the noise that gets added is independent between the training steps, but in the paper they make it negatively correlated between the steps, and argue that this helps with the generalization of the networks because it moves them towards flatter minima.

This seems conceptually related to things that have been discussed on LessWrong, e.g. the observations by John Wentworth that search tends to lead to flat minima, which may have beneficial properties.

I would have liked to see them test this on harder problems than the ones they used, and/or on a greater variety of real-world problems.
Breaking the SIA with an exponentially-Sleeping Beauty
by 0naut — 2022-02-20T08:03:32.324Z

In this post I'd like to construct an extension to the Sleeping Beauty problem which is unsolvable from an thirder/SIA perspective. The core of the construction is having the number of wakings Beauty will experience follow a distribution with an infinite mean. This leads to Beauty being unable to assign normalized probability values when reasoning under SIA. Given this forum's fascination with anthropic reasoning and this problem, this may be of interest.

The original Sleeping Beauty problem

The following is a summary of the thirder/SIA approach to the original Sleeping Beauty problem. From what I can tell, this forum is very well versed here, so I won't go into too much background detail.

In the original problem, we have the following two steps for the experimenter:

Flip a coin. If heads, record the value N=0. If tails, record the value N=1.
Put Beauty to sleep [on Sunday]. She will be woken once on each of the following N+1 days, with memory erased between wakings. (i.e. once if heads, twice if tails)

Let Mk be the proposition "I am awake and today is the kth day since the experiment began". (I.e. M1 is "I am awake and it is Monday"; M2 is "I am awake and it is Tuesday".) Also let M be the proposition "I am awake", in the sense that M=M1∨M2.

The problem is then to give Beauty a value to assign to the conditional probability of heads given that she has been awoken, i.e. to

P(N=0∣M).

One version of the thirder/SIA calculation for this value then proceeds as follows.

P(N=0∣M)P(N=1∣M)=P(M∣N=0)P(M∣N=1)P(N=0)P(N=1)=P(M1∣N=0)+P(M2∣N=0)P(M1∣N=1)+P(M2∣N=1)P(N=0)P(N=1)=P(M1∣N=0)+02∗P(M1∣N=1)P(N=0)P(N=1)=12P(N=0∣M1)P(N=1∣M1)=121/21/2=12.

Where the steps are respectively due to:

Bayes' law.
That M=M1∨M2 and that M1, M2 are disjoint propositions.
For the numerator, that M2 is impossible given N=0 (i.e. we cannot wake up on Tuesday if the coin came up heads). For the denominator, this is the part of the SIA assumption: given that the coin came up tails, and we cannot distinguish a waking on Monday or Tuesday, we must put equal weight on both possibilities.
Bayes' law.
Following SIA/thirder reasoning, we put equal weight on heads or tails given that we are waking on Monday. I leave the subtler point of justifying this assignment to the many expositions of thirder/SIA reason

...
Books Worthy of Integration
by Roven Skyfal — 2022-02-20T08:03:25.617Z

Here is the list of recommend books for someone interested in enhancing their understanding of the world.

This is a post from Substack which can be found here.

Not long ago, I would read roughly one book every couple of years. I had a busier life. I didn’t value spending my attention on books. It wasn’t until 3 years ago that my life settled down. With new found time, my mind’s hunger for novel information increased and I stumbled upon our local library. Fortunately for me, they provide access to two audio book apps (Hoopla and Libby). I also picked up more physical books. My consumption is roughly 75% audio and 25% physical. With the ability to increase playback speed in the apps and my commute, I am able to get through 1-2 books per week. I am not a fast reader, but do purchase physical books worthy of reading or referencing again.

As I learn, I find myself wanting to share new concepts with others. These ideas often update my mental models and have increased the resolution of my “map of the territory”. Throughout my journey, intermixed with the phenomenal books below have been less impressive books. The goal of this list is to provide a guide for those searching. I will try and update this periodically. If you have recommendations for additions, please comment below.

I put the topics and rankings in order of importance, but read what interest you most. The intent of this post is to provide a rubric for the self-guided learner who wishes to enrich their life and better try and understand the world around them. This is for my daughter. This is for AGI. This is for anyone who lights up while learning new things.

Happiness

The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
The Book of Joy by Dalai Lama

On Living a Good Life

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman *
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Waking Up by Sam Harris
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu *
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (if you can get your hands on his Findhorn Retreat, listen to that)
A Hunter-Gather’s Guide to the 21st Century by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Walden by Henry Thoreau
Meditations by Marcus Arelius *
How to Talk to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell ~
Tribe by Sebastian Junger

On Thinking

Lost in Thought by Zena Hitz *
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Antifragile by Taleb Nassim
Thinking, Fast and Slo

...
How Many (Smallish) Organic Compounds Are There?
by chemslug — 2022-02-20T04:43:08.623Z

Introduction

Here's a question I've been pondering recently: how many organic compounds are there? There are multiple ways to interpret the question, each of which leads to consideration of a different potential set of compounds, and each of which is informative in its own way.

First off, what is an organic compound? This sounds straightforward, but because of the history of the term, it isn't. Originally, "organic compounds" were carbon-containing compounds associated with living things. Over time, the term drifted to include most carbon-containing compounds, except for things like carbon dioxide, minerals like limestone (CaCO3), and allotropes of pure carbon (like diamonds, graphite, or carbon nanotubes). Wikipedia defines an organic compound as "generally any chemical compounds that contain carbon-hydrogen bonds". That definition seems good enough for our purposes[1], so we'll go with it.

Next, what do we mean by "are there"? Is it substances that have actually been found or made and characterized? A quick check of PubChem says that there are around 100 million (108) compounds with information submitted. However, that's not quite what I was envisioning when I asked the question. The compounds we've actually made or isolated (and more importantly, characterized to a greater or lesser extent) are only a tiny fraction of chemical space, which I will loosely define as the set of all possible[2] molecules.

Example Chemical Sub-spaces: Hydrocarbons and Proteins

Organic chemical space contains, in theory, an infinite number of molecules. Consider the set of fully-saturated, unbranched hydrocarbon chains: methane with a single carbon, ethane with two, etc. In principle, one could construct an arbitrarily long chain with no reason to expect chemical instability. In practice, we make polyethylene chains up to about half a million carbon atoms in length that are reasonable approximations of that thought exercise.

Of course, ultra-long hydrocarbons aren't that interesting chemically, with only one monomer and no functional groups. What about molecules that actually do things? Let's take proteins, a strong contender for "most interesting class of molecules". There are 20 naturally-occurring amino acids. A 30-kDa protein[3] has about 300 amino acids, so ther...
Microcovid Becoming Less Useful
by jefftk — 2022-02-20T03:50:02.301Z

I want to start by saying how much I appreciate what the volunteers
behind

Microcovid have done.
Providing a risk calculator has been really helpful to a lot of people.
There's also been a lot of value in running a centralized estimate of
the impact of different mitigations.

On the other hand, at this point, I think it has become substantially
less useful, and in many cases is leading people to seriously
overestimate the level of precautions that are appropriate for their
particular situation:

Its data on prevalence is stale, because the automatic updater
last ran successfully on 2022-02-07.

To determine how risky things are in your area it uses the
average number of cases from last week. When cases are rising, it
extrapolates to predict growth. On the other hand, when cases are
falling (as they are now here, and have been for a while) it does not
extrapolate and assumes that cases have stayed flat.

It's models the people you interact with as being equally
likely to currently be infectious, regardless of their vaccination
status. Vaccinated people, however, are less likely to get covid and
are infectious for a shorter time period. [EDIT: possibly it is modeling the "less likely to get covid" piece but not "less likely to transmit if infected" and "infectious for less time" pieces?]

It defaults to a risk budget of 200 microcovids per week, a 1%
annual chance of getting covid, regardless of what you tell it for
your vaccination status. The highest budget it offers is only 10x
that, for people who "can't avoid risk, but still want to make smart
choices". This was a reasonable way of looking at things earlier in
the pandemic, but at this stage I think much higher budgets are
generally appropriate for fully vaccinated people: the risk to the
individual is generally extremely low and the risk they impose on
others is relatively low. Altruistically, since most of society is
operating on a much higher risk budget keeping to low one is a lot of sacrifice
for minimal benefit.

For a vaccinated and boosted person I think a better approach is to
use no budget most of the time, and then use a budget of perhaps
10,000 microcovids/week (~50% annual risk) when demand on the medical
system is likely to be especially high.

Even just the first two have a very large impact. For example, it
currently gives a random person in my
county as havin...
How to estimate confidence intervals for fermi estimate?
by Sønderjye — 2022-02-20T01:26:12.625Z

Suppose you want to take a guess at the number of candyfloss sold over a month in some area and you would like a 90% confidence interval(CI) intead of a point estimate. You fermi estimates for two central subcomponents are:

(1) a 90% CI of the number of candyfloss a single candyfloss seller sells per month, say 10k-40k.
(2) a 90% CI of the number of candyfloss that a professional candyfloss seller sells during a month, say 50-8000.

Can you estimate a 90% CI of candyfloss sold over a month based on that information? If not, could you if you made some assumptions about the distribution of (1) or (2)(e.g. could you do it if they were uniformly distributed)? Could you use the percentiles of the root or squared fo the extremes(e.g. combining either the 0.25th(5%^2) or the 23th(square root of 5%) percentiles)?

My intuition is that you can't just multiply the extremes of (1) and (2) but I'm not confident in what you need to make event approximately correct claims.
Edited to fix an error in (1)
12 interesting things I learned studying the discovery of nature's laws
by Ben Pace — 2022-02-19T23:39:47.841Z

I've been thinking about out whether I can discover laws of agency and wield them to prevent AI ruin (perhaps by building an AGI myself in a different paradigm than machine learning).

So far I’ve looked into the history of the discovery of physical laws (gravity in particular) and mathematical laws (probability theory in particular). Here are 12 things I’ve learned or been surprised by.

1.

Data-gathering was a crucial step in discovering both gravity and probability theory. One rich dude had a whole island and set it up to have lenses on lots of parts of it, and for like a year he’d go around each day and note down the positions of the stars. Then this data was worked on by others who turned it into equations of motion.

2.

Relatedly, looking at the celestial bodies was a big deal. It was almost the whole game in gravity, but also a little helpful for probability theory (specifically the normal distribution was developed in part by noting that systematic errors in celestial measuring equipment followed a simple distribution).

It hadn’t struck me before, but putting a ton of geometry problems on the ceiling for the entire civilization led a lot of people to try to answer questions about it. (It makes Eliezer’s choice in That Alien Message apt.) I’m tempted in a munchkin way to find other ways to do this, like to write a math problem on the surface of the moon, or petition Google to put a prediction market on its home page, or something more elegant than those two.

3.

Probability theory was substantially developed around real-world problems! I thought math was all magical and ivory tower, but it was much more grounded than I expected.

After a few small things like accounting and insurance and doing permutations of the alphabet, games of chance (gambling) was what really kicked it off, with Fermat and Pascal trying to figure out the expected value of games (they didn’t phrase it like that, they put it more like “if the game has to stop before it’s concluded, how should the winnings be split between the players?“).

Other people who consulted with gamblers also would write down data about things like how often different winning hands would come up in different games, and discovered simple distributions, then tried to put equations to them. Later it was developed further by people trying to reason about gases and temperatures, and then again in understandin...
What The Foucault
by adamShimi — 2022-02-19T22:48:39.276Z

Epistemic status:

exploratory

Student: Rah, it’s so frustrating!

Master: What is?

Student: I keep stumbling back into Foucault, and I’m never able to decide if I should discard him or if there’s something in there.

Master: I see. Why do you think that he might be irrelevant?

Student: A bunch of reasons: people keep telling me that he’s either wrong or outright dangerous, he apparently made a specialty of historical mistakes and biased evidence, and post-modernism seems to always end in denying reality.

Master: Pretty damning. And yet you still think that he could teach you something?

Student: That’s the frustrating part! I have this intuition that Foucault built — or tried to build — some great epistemic tools, and that these could be an important part of the toolkit I’m building.

Master: Just try reading him then, and see where that leads you.

Student: I did.

Master: Oh. And it didn’t go well, given your look.

Student: I might have thrown the book in frustration.

Master: I see.

Student: And stomped on it. And insulted its ancestry. And burned it.

Master: Not reading him directly, then. Or at least not without some preparation. And maybe some anger counseling.

Student: That’s why I looked for a secondary source after that.

Master: Good call.

Student: And I found this book: “

How to read Foucault

”, by Johanna Oksala.

Master: How should you read him, then?

Student: Well, she does make a case for Foucault as breaking certainties. For example, she writes

While science and much of philosophy aim to decipher from among the confusion of events and experiences that which is necessary and can be articulated as universal law, Foucault's thought moves in exactly the opposite direction. He attempted to find among the necessities that which upon closer philosophical scrutiny turned out to be contingent, fleeting and arbitrary. For Foucault, the aim of philosophy is to question the ways in which we think, live and relate to other people and to ourselves in order to show how that-which-is could be otherwise.

Master: But you already knew Foucault’s aim was critical, didn’t you? That’s one of the issue with hardcore postmodernism: overcriticizing to the point of intellectual suicide.

Student: Yes, but I wasn’t sure that this was a fair reading. The fact that a Foucault scholar and overall defender says it has more weight than from critics.

Master: F...
Is veganism morally correct?
by FinalFormal2 — 2022-02-19T21:20:55.688Z

The first argument I've heard mainly comes down to showing that there aren't meaningful distinguishing factors between animals and humans, so that if you're fine eating animals, you should also be fine eating humans under some circumstances.

Another argument I've heard is that if you accept eating animals, there's really no reason you can't abuse them or engage in bestiality. We already sexually violate them in different ways and abuse them physically, so if you're uncomfortable with dog/bull fighting or bestiality, you should probably be similarly uncomfortable with supporting the meat industry

Finally, there's just the probability aspect of this, where even if you're 1% unsure that eating meat is wrong, that's essentially equivalent to a 1% chance of an outcome with over 100 murders/rapes that you've contributed to, which is equivalent to more than one atrocity personally committed by you. It's like if I had a pork company with no safety standards so 1% of the time you purchased my meat you were actually eating one of my employees

However, the striking counterargument to all of this that I can't overcome is simply that morals aren't real. They aren't anything that can be measured or verified and any system to measure or verify them would be a moral assumption itself.