trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A critical agential account of free will, causation, and physics
by jessicata — 2020-03-05T07:57:38.193Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2020/03/05/a-critical-agential-account-of-free-will-causation-and-physics/

This is an account of free choice in a physical universe. It is very much relevant to decision theory and philosophy of science. It is largely metaphysical, in terms of taking certain things to be basically real and examining what can be defined in terms of these things.

The starting point of this account is critical and agential. By agential, I mean that the ontology I am using is from the point of view of an agent: a perspective that can, at the very least, receive observations, have cognitions, and take actions. By critical, I mean that this ontology involves uncertain conjectures subject to criticism, such as criticism of being logically incoherent or incompatible with observations. This is very much in a similar spirit to critical rationalism.

Close attention will be paid to falsifiability and refutation, principally for ontological purposes, and secondarily for epistemic purposes. Falsification conditions specify the meanings of laws and entities relative to the perspective of some potentially falsifying agent. While the agent may believe in unfalsifiable entities, falsification conditions will serve to precisely pin down that which can be precisely pinned down.

I have only seen "agential" used in the philosophical literature in the context of agential realism, a view I do not understand well enough to comment on. I was tempted to use "subjective"; however, while subjects have observations, they do not necessarily have the ability to take actions. Thus I believe "agential" has a more concordant denotation.

You'll note that my notion of "agent" already assumes one can take actions. Thus, a kind of free will is taken as metaphysically basic. This presupposition may cause problems later. However, I will try to show that, if careful attention is paid, the obvious problems (such as contradiction with determinism) can be avoided.

The perspective in this post can be seen as starting from agency, defining consequences in terms of agency, and defining physics in terms of consequences. In contrast, the most salient competing decision theory views (including framings of CDT, EDT, and FDT) define agency in terms of consequences ("expected utility maximization"), and consequences in terms of physics ("counterfactuals"). So I am rebasing the ontological stack, turning it upside-down. This is less absurd than it first appears, as will become

...
Weighting Attachment in Relationship Decisions
by wolverdude — 2020-03-05T06:04:19.169Z

Background

tl;dr - skip to Weighting Attachment

My Dating Models

When I first set up an online dating profile, I remember noting that the experience of browsing matches felt a lot like shopping on Amazon. You compare the specs of the different products and try to figure out which one best meets your needs. As a perfectionist, that has been my implicit model of dating from fairly early on. There are a large number of potential mates out there, and most of them would be a poor choice, but there are a few of sufficient quality to be a life partner with you. And so the process of dating is to find an optimally compatible life partner.

But I was unfortunate enough to grow up with a peculiar dating culture that engaged my perfectionism at cross-purposes with this. That culture emphasized purity, and the ideal was to date as few people as possible before marriage. I internalized this to mean that I shouldn't ask someone out unless I was already pretty sure I wanted to marry them. You can see that this, when combined with the shopping paradigm, put me in a bit of a bind. And so my response was to not date. Anyone. Ever. This was not a conscious choice but a natural local minimum that I could not escape without ditching one of those two paradigms.

Something's Missing

So I started dating after finally ditching purity culture. But not dating means I missed out on a lot of experiences of dating until relatively late in life. And this also meant I had never actually tested the shopping paradigm. Now that I'm in it, I can see that normal people do not follow that paradigm. I suppose that explains why lots of other people in purity culture manage to pair up just fine. But the reason that people don't follow that paradigm is feelings. I have discovered that there are very strong feelings constraining my actions. Those feelings plunged me into my first relationship, and now they're brutally punishing me for ending it.

But this also makes me wonder... is that paradigm correct? Do the presence of feelings and attachment actually change the calculus of what is optimal? Is a partner who is less compatible actually the correct choice if you have history and chemistry?

And in there is also the question of commitment. I always had one template for commitment, and one decision. Should I marry this person? But it seems that there are several steps up to marriage (or life partnership of

...
Motte/bailey doctrine is often a byproduct of distributed argumentation
by Three-Monkey Mind — 2020-03-05T05:40:08.753Z

confidence: I think I'm on to something

(I'm posting this publicly because I'd like it to get passed around for corrections, both nitpicky (typos, thinkos) and important (glaring errors in logic). I need to whip up a better title for it, too. Corrections appreciated.)

Prior reading:

Scott Alexander’s All in all, another brick in the motte

Nicholas Shackel’s Motte and bailey doctrines

It bothers me when other people use a troll’s truism in a discussion. It probably bothers you, too. A person uses a troll’s truism when he claims something bold and, when his audience rejects his claim, reformulates his claim into something innocuous and asserts that the reformulation is a restatement of the initial, rejected assertion.

Now, when someone deploys troll’s truisms out of unthinking habit or tactical choice, this is referred to as motte-and-bailey doctrine. Someone adheres to motte-and-bailey doctrine when he regularly puts forward an expansive claim (the bailey), and, if the expansive claim isn’t accepted, retreats to a more defensible position (the motte).

At the end of the post, Alexander points out one of the problems inherent in debating a broad-ranging idea (in this case, feminism). Finally, he has a good suggestion to help avoid motte-and-bailey switches in the middle of a conversation:

So what is the real feminism we should be debating? Why would you even ask that question? What is this, some kind of dumb high school debate club? Who the heck thinks it would be a good idea to say “Here’s a vague poorly-defined concept that mind-kills everyone who touches it — quick, should you associate it with positive affect or negative affect?!”

Taboo your words, then replace the symbol with the substance. If you have an actual thing you’re trying to debate, then it should be obvious when somebody’s changing the topic. If working out who’s using motte-and-bailey (or weak man) is remotely difficult, it means your discussion went wrong several steps earlier and you probably have no idea what you’re even arguing about.

Unfortunately, this only works when there are a small number of people involved — no more than two or three. If the discussion is happening at your (anti)favorite social-networking site, you might have an argument structure like the following:

A, B, and C all believe and argue for bailey β

D, E, F, and G all believe and argue for motte µ

H, J, and K all believ

...
Covid-19: Things I'm Doing Differently
by jefftk — 2020-03-05T01:40:02.214Z

The coronavirus is now spreading through multiple communities, and
while there

isn't
yet evidence of it in Boston I expect there will be soon. Because
of the

long
incubation period and

large
testing delays it may already be here. Here are things I've
started doing differently:

Washing hands a lot. I'm now washing my hands before eating,
after riding public transit, after touching shared surfaces at work,
and on getting home.

Not shaking hands. At work I've been saying a lot of "I'm not
shaking hands right now, sorry!" with a smile and a wave.

Avoiding touching shared surfaces with hands.
Pushing elevator buttons with my elbow, using door-opening buttons
when present or awkwardly trying to use my sleeved arm, using napkins
on the tongs in the cafeteria at work.

Bicycling to work instead of taking the subway. I live close
enough to work that biking would make a lot of sense, and it's
something I've been meaning to do for exercise. I had stopped biking
several years ago because I was hurting my knees, but I think if I
take it easy they'll be ok. Today I biked there and back for the
first time, and it was pretty nice!

Requiring guests to clean hands on arrival. We're keeping hand
sanitizer by the front door, and asking everyone to either use it or
wash their hands when they get here.

Not putting candles on cakes. Blowing out candles on birthday
cakes isn't all that sanitary at the best of times. At Anna's
birthday yesterday I made a pretend cake by mixing flour, water, and
red food coloring:

This lets us still have candles, and Anna can still blow them out, but
without blowing all over food everyone is about to eat.

Putting copper tape on shared surfaces. Copper kills viruses,
and Julia has put copper tape on doorknobs and other shared surfaces
around the house:

On the other hand, there are major things I/we aren't doing, at least
not yet.

Working from home: I can work remotely if I absolutely have to,
but I feel isolated and get sad and lonely after a day or so. This is
a big constraint for me in general, and I
haven't figured out any good solution. At some point with this I may
need to work remotely for a while, and I'm really not looking forward
to it.

Taking the kids out of school: Lily (5y) is in kindergarten, and
while it looks like Covid-19 is relatively safe for children they
could sti

...
Embedded vs. External Decision Problems
by Chris_Leong — 2020-03-05T00:23:07.970Z

(I've discussed these ideas in the past, but this idea was lacking a canonical reference post)

Suppose that you are an expected-utility maximising agent. This means that when you make a decision you should calculate the expected-utility for each counterfactual and choose the counterfactual with the highest expected utility. However, if you know yourself well enough to know that you are an expected utility maximiser, this knowledge can change your counterfactuals. For example, this can provide information about your likely future actions, the expected number of expected utility maximisers in the world or how clones of you might behave. In general, if you are in an embedded problem and you have reflective knowledge of your own algorithm, then your decision theory provides both a system of evaluation and a data-point about the world. We can call this the embedded view.

In contrast, we could also imagine a utility maximiser outside the problem description, analysing the decisions of various agents within the problem according to how well they maximise utility, none of which need to be utility maximisers themselves. In general, when we use a decision theory in this way, we will call this the external view of the problem. Normally, we'll be talking about applying one or both of these two things:

A method of constructing counterfactuals - ie. evidential counterfactuals, causal counterfactuals, timeless counterfactuals, logical counterfactuals
A method of evaluating counterfactuals - ie. expected utility, minimax, maximax

We can use these as tools for evaluating agents that aren't necessarily using these tools. One case where this would be useful is when knowing how the agent makes a decision would mean that only a single decision would be consistent with the problem description and hence that the decision theory problem would be trivial in a particular sense. For example, an updateless agent will always one-box in Newcomb's, so it kind of doesn't make sense to ask what it would have scored if it had two-boxed. On the other hand, if we just use updateless decision theory to help evaluate the situation externally by constructing our counterfactuals, then we don't run into this issue and we end up with multiple consistent counterfactuals.

Another situation where this is useful is the Smoking Lesion Problem. The Smoking Lesion Problem has been criticised in a few places for...
For viruses, is presenting with fatigue correlated with causing chronic fatigue?
by jimrandomh — 2020-03-04T21:09:48.149Z

Intuitively, one might expect that viruses which cause fatigue during acute infection are more likely to also cause chronic fatigue later. Is this in fact the case?

COVID-19 causes fatigue in about 70% of cases according to one study (though studies have had mixed results, most likely due to sampling patients at different levels of severity and differences in how symptom lists are collected).

Note that while there is pretty good data about the symptoms of viruses on presentation, data on chronic fatigue is relatively poor. So, a good answer to this question might look like "human examplevirus infects 20% of the population[cite1], causes fatigue 30% of the time[cite2], and is implicated in chronic fatigue on questionable patient forums[cite3]."
[Reference Post] Info cone
by Mati_Roy — 2020-03-04T20:12:16.286Z

(This is a reference post meant to simply and briefly explain a new concept. I will need to refer to it in other posts.)

Definition

'Info cone' is short for 'Information Cone'.

A future info cone is the path that a flash of information propagating at maximum speed, emanating from a single event (localized to a single point in space and a single moment in time) and traveling in all directions, would take through spacetime.

A past info cone behaves like the Future Info Cone in reverse: a n-sphere which contracts in radius at maximum information propagating speed until it converges to a point at an exact position and time.

In universes where the maximum speed at which information can propagate is the speed of light (or the speed of any boson really), then the info cones are of the same shape than light cones.

Note that, in practice, obstacles could block or slow down (ex.: through diffraction) the speed at which information can propagate, but the info cone is defined as the theoretical limit — in our universe that would mean in vacuum. I suggest using 'real info cone' to discuss the actual, idiosyncratic region that could receive a flashed message (similarly 'real light cone' when using light). Note that the 'real cone' isn't in fact a perfect cone.

Use cases

The concept of info cone can be useful to discuss concepts that are agnostic to the maximum information-propagating-speed or whether a universe has light, and so can apply to other universes as well. It's also particularly useful in discussing the implications that faster-than-light travelling in our universe would have, or how likely we are to be in such a universe.
[AN #89]: A unifying formalism for preference learning algorithms
by Rohin Shah — 2020-03-04T18:20:01.393Z

Find all Alignment Newsletter resources

here

. In particular, you can

sign up

, or look through this

spreadsheet

of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter. I'm always happy to hear feedback; you can send it to me by replying to this email.

Audio version

here

(may not be up yet).

Highlights

Reward-rational (implicit) choice: A unifying formalism for reward learning

(Hong Jun Jeon, Smitha Milli et al) (summarized by Rohin): We've got algorithms for learning preferences from

demonstrations

(

AN #12

) (possibly

ranked

(

AN #60

)),

comparisons

(

AN #67

),

proxy rewards

(

AN #69

), and even the

observed state

(

AN #45

). The insight of this paper is that these are all instances of a simple underlying formalism.

Specifically, these forms of preference learning can be described by two properties: (1) the set of choices that the human picks from and (2) how each choice corresponds to a distribution over agent trajectories. Given these properties, we assume that the human makes their choice according to a Boltzmann-rational model (where the human is more likely to choose an option if it leads to higher expected reward). We have now specified a likelihood over the choice given the reward, and we can use Bayes rule to infer a distribution over the reward given the human's choice.

Consider more exotic types of feedback, such as the human's decision to

turn the agent off

(

AN #69

). Here, the human has two options: turning the agent off (corresponding to the agent staying still forever), or letting it continue (corresponding to the agent taking the trajectory that maximizes its current expected reward). If the agent has the right reward function, then the Boltzmann rational human would let it continue; as a result, if the human instead tries to turn the agent off, Bayes Rule allows the agent to infer that its belief about the reward must be wrong. Thus, even this decision of whether to turn the agent off can be captured in this framework.

The paper then shows two examples of new feedback types that can be generated from this framework: first, credit assignment, in which the human identifies a subset of the trajectory that had maximal reward, and second, meta-choice, where the choice of which type of feedback to give can itself give information about the reward function.

Rohin's opinion: I like this paper; it's a very clear explanation of a "reci...
What "Saving throws" does the world have against coronavirus? (And how plausible are they?)
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-03-04T18:04:18.662Z

Following up on my earlier question, which asked about the implications of coronavirus infecting >10% of the world, I'm now more interested in discussing how likely it is that that will happen. To that end, I'm asking about "saving throws," i.e. reasons why the virus might be stopped before then.

I know of three plausible ones so far:

1. Warm weather is coming and might dramatically slow or even stop the virus.

2. A vaccine might be found and deployed.

3. World governments might follow in China's footsteps and initiate massive quarantines etc.

Are there more?

And how plausible are these three?

My sense right now is that 1 is somewhat probable, 2 is improbable, and 3 is improbable.
To mask or not mask
by jmh — 2020-03-04T15:55:04.646Z

A rather large disconnect between what I hear from medical side and how people act seem clear. The medical officials all say for the most part the general population, other than those infected, don't benefit from wearing the masks.

In part that is due to improper use. I discount that because I've seen too many pictures of the medical response staff wearing masks that simply cannot be ones that create a true, airtight seal.

The other part seems to be that the virus is not really an airborne infection but more about small droplets of human fluids which carry the virus. Hence the recommendation that those with the infection use the mask to limit how they are spreading it.

Still, infection is a random chemical reaction. As such your chance of contracting the infection is a function of likelihood of an individual virus (one individual protein group) times the number of viruses that entered.

Seems that as long as the probability of any given virus to succeed in infecting you is low, then anything one does to limit the number incoming would be helpful.

Granted, there may well be a large number, in absolute terms, in any micro droplet of fluid inhaled which might itself make the effort pointless. But has anyone seen any estimates or other data at this level rather than the more aggregate type data like R0 seems to be?
Did everyone miss the big thing about your phone?
by jmh — 2020-03-04T13:35:15.495Z

Have not read through all the comments, and probably won't, so perhaps this has already been pointed out.

I don't see that my phone is any more at risk than my hands, I can wipe the desk down with a sterilizing wipe, and do the same with my phone if I want. I tend to keep my phone either in my hand or in a pocket when outside my house. So as far as I can see the phone is not more a threat than my hands.

However, I is not uncommon for me to have my phone touching or very near my face, ears, mouth.

Has anyone suggested using speaker and holding the phone away from your face? Or is the assumption that everyone just used wired or bluetooth headsets/earbuds with a mic?
Is there a better way to define groups for COVID-19 impact?
by jmh — 2020-03-04T13:24:51.221Z

I think everyone who has posted a table of stats for COVID-19 infection or deaths seems to do a 10 year grouping. For example here. (Used only because I was looking at that post when it occurred to me.)

However, my understanding is that physiological changes in the human body are not linear over time but tend to be more like state changes. Now, it is true these changes are not on any annual schedule either but we do have some average ages for when changes in the human body seem to occur.

Could using the 10 year grouping actually hide important implications for those trying to make personal decisions based on that data presentation?
Bleach
by jefftk — 2020-03-04T03:20:03.446Z

Traditional chlorine bleach, appropriately diluted, can be used for
disinfecting and sanitizing, so it's potentially very handy to have in
emergencies. It can also be confusing, however, because it degrades,
there are many kinds, concentrations are not emphasized, and you want
different dilutions for different purposes.

The first problem is that many things are sold as "bleach". Some of
them don't use chlorine, others have additives to make them smell
better or have less risk of splashing. These are all potentially good
properties to have in a laundry additive, but they're not what you
want for sanitizing. Everything below is for regular chlorine bleach,
and not oxygen bleach, scented bleach, or splash-less bleach.

The second problem is that bleach comes in a range of concentrations.
We usually talk about "regular household bleach" as being 5%-6%
chlorine, but the range is larger than that. My local store brand is
8.6% chlorine, and some cheap bleaches are as low as 2.6%. Somewhere,
in small print, the bottle will say what the actual concentration is.

The third problem is that bleach degrades over time, though it's hard
to find numbers on how quickly. The shelf life is generally given as
a
year from manufacture, provided that you keep it in a cool dark
place. It's relatively cheap, so it's worth buying a bottle every ~6m
even if you go through it slower than that. Diluted solutions degrade
much faster, so mix dilutions fresh daily.

Before working with bleach, it's good to review the ways in which it
can be dangerous, especially right out of the bottle:

The same things that make bleach good at killing germs make it
good at killing parts of you that it comes in contact with. It's
especially important not to get it in your eyes, let it into cuts, or
drink it, but it also will eat through your skin. If you've ever
gotten a little bleach on your hands you might remember them feeling
soft afterwards: that's because it's removed the outer layer of skin.
Wear gloves and googles when working with straight bleach.

When diluting bleach you want to avoid splashing the
full-strength bleach onto yourself. First measure out your water,
then add your measure of bleach.

Bleach releases chlorine gas, which is toxic. Working with
bleach outdoors is good, and opening a window for ventilation also
works.

Mixing bleach with acids such as vinega

...