trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Property as Coordination Minimization
by Vaniver — 2020-08-04T19:24:15.759Z

A friend recently noted that they were in favor of private property, but the best defense they had to link was instead a defense of finance. So I thought I’d give it a try. In light of a distinction people often draw between

‘private property’ and ‘personal property’

, I’m going to work up to defending ‘impersonal private property’, starting with intuitions and examples grounded in personal property.

First, what even do we mean by property? To begin, observe that material things are sometimes scarce or rivalrous. If I eat a sandwich, you can’t also eat it; if I sleep in a bed, you can’t also sleep in it at the same time; if an acre of land is rented out for agricultural use, only one of us can collect the rent check. Beyond scarcity inherent to reality, we can also create it with rules; if I invent a cool new sandwich idea, society could decide that I have the right to decide who can and can’t make that sandwich for some amount of time. [The first patents were for restaurants, giving them exclusive rights for a year to new dishes they invented.]

Property, then, is the societally recognized right to decide who can or can’t do three different things: ‘use’, or deriving some personal benefit from the thing; ‘fruit’, or extracting some value from the thing without deeply changing it; and ‘abuse’, or making changes or transferring ownership of the thing. For example, consider an apple tree; climbing the tree is an example of use, picking the apples is an example of fruit, and chopping it down to make a chair out of it is an example of abuse. If I wholly own the tree, I get to choose all of those things; perhaps I just have usufruct, allowing me to use it or harvest the fruit so long as I don't damage it; perhaps I only have use, or perhaps I have no rights at all with regards to the tree.

In this view, the benefit of property is fundamentally preventative; if I own an apple tree, I can prevent other people from climbing the tree, or picking the apples, or chopping down the tree, even if they want to. Hence the slogan that ‘property is theft’; without it, you could do any of those things to my tree, and with property, you can’t. Also note how much joint ownership degrades in value; if everyone has the right to chop dow...
Interpretability in ML: A Broad Overview
by  — 2020-08-04T19:03:20.828Z

(Reposting because I think a GreaterWrong bug on submission made this post invisible for a while last week so I'm trying again on LW.)

This blog post is an overview of ways to think about machine learning interpretability; it covers some recent research techniques as well as directions for future research. This is an updated version of this post from a few weeks ago. I've now added code, examples, and some pictures.

What Are Existing Overviews?

Many of these ideas are based heavily off of Zach Lipton's Mythos of Model Interpretability, which I think is the best paper for understanding the different definitions of interpretability. For a deeper dive into specific techniques, I recommend A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models which covers a wide variety of approaches for many different ML well as model-agnostic approaches. For neural nets specifically, Explainable Deep Learning: A Field Guide for the Uninitiated provides an in-depth read. For other conceptual surveys of the field, Definitions, methods, and applications in interpretable machine learning and Explainable Machine Learning for Scientific Insights and Discoveries. The Explainable Machine Learning paper in particular is quite nice because it gives a hierarchy of increasingly more interpretable models across several domains and use cases.

(Shout-out to Connected Papers which made navigating the paper landscape for interpretability very bearable.)

As always, you can find code used to generate the images here on GitHub.

In the rest of this post, we'll go over many ways to formalize what "interpretability" means. Broadly, interpretability focuses on the how. It's focused on getting some notion of an explanation for the decisions made by our models. Below, each section is operationalized by a concrete question we can ask of our ML model using a specific definition of interpretability. Before that, though, if you're new to all this, I'll explain briefly about why we might care about interpretability at all.

Why Care About Interpretability?

Firstly, interpretability in ML is useful because it can aid in trust. As humans, we may be reluctant to rely on ML models for certain critical tasks , e.g. medical diagnosis, unless we know "how they work". There's often a fear of unknown unknowns when trusting in something opaque, which we see when people confront new technology. Approaches to interpretabil...
RT-LAMP is the right way to scale diagnostic testing for the coronavirus
by Kevin — 2020-08-04T10:05:29.718Z

RT-LAMP is the right way to scale diagnostic testing for the coronavirus

by Kevin Fischer

kfischer $& gmail *( com

RT-LAMP compared to RT-PCR is a less versatile and more recently invented laboratory technique. LAMP is more suited to actual diagnostic testing at scale than PCR but never became industry standard despite its demonstrated superiority. Labcorp/Quest/One Medical use PCR for their coronavirus diagnostic tests and they currently have delays as long as two weeks for issuing results which is totally unacceptable for fighting this pandemic. Color in San Francisco has one of few widely available RT-LAMP tests for the coronavirus and they generally give results back in one to two business days and are not bottlenecked by laboratory procedure.

An open access RT-LAMP coronavirus diagnostic toolkit was published at the end of July and I believe presents a solution to scaling diagnostic testing to where it needs to be. A rapid, highly sensitive and open-access SARS-CoV-2 detection assay for laboratory and home testing

What steps can we take to help national testing capacity switch to RT-LAMP instead of RT-PCR? There are parallel approaches here -- bottom up development suggests distributed citizen science RT-LAMP labs to fill in gaps in testing capacity, top down distribution suggests convincing the major industry players to devote resources to switching to RT-LAMP over RT-PCR. I'm going to take the bottom up approach; can anyone else figure out how to help Quest and Labcorp switch over to the superior testing method?

Does anyone else want to set up their own RT-LAMP operation? I'm going to give it a try and will write a guide on what to buy once we're operational. One of my business partners was an innovator in LAMP primer design over ten years ago and we still own the lab equipment needed for the simple procedure. Presumably as non FDA approved citizen science it will have to be "for research only" and not for diagnostic testing purposes but it's possible the FDA is being cooperative and that actual FDA licenses could be issued on a timeframe that is reasonable.
A sketch of 'Simulacra Levels and their Interactions' 
by Yoav Ravid — 2020-08-04T09:13:21.781Z

Two sketches i made based on Simulacra Levels and their Interactions. These are just sketches right now, i intend to make something better looking in the future (this is especially true for the first image). but i'd love to hear ideas and get feedback on these early versions.

The above diagram would look much better if there was symmetry. but the post misses some combos, some of which i also can't see how they're applicable (L1 & L2, for example).

The colors seem too happy for the topic to be honest :)

Here i also made a Venn version. it has my idea for the ideologue, and then the only ones missing are (1, 3 & 4 VS 2) and (1 & 4). for the former i have a hard time thinking of something that would fit there, and for the latter I'm pretty sure there's isn't something that fits there.
What is filling the hole left by religion?
by Philosophistry — 2020-08-04T06:48:13.388Z

Self-help books represent the next step in the evolution of our collective consciousness. It might sound like a stretch, but if we consider that religion was once how society told its story to itself, then the recent erosion of religion is creating a new kind of story.

Norm-gatherers

Believers often defend religion with this rhetorical question: Without religion, how will people know right from wrong? But the standard rebuttal, as trumpeted by prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, is that everybody already has an innate understanding of right and wrong. Hitchens said that religion gets its morality from humans and that every society has forbidden perjury, theft, murder, and rape.

But notice what transgressions he cites: perjury, theft, murder, and rape. These are heinous wrongs that are obvious even to children. Obviously, lying is bad. Obviously, hurting others is bad. So to knock down religion for reiterating obvious morals comes across as straw-manning.

Another tactic that atheists use is to mock low-level norms, such as the Mormon practice of wearing Temple garments or the Orthodox Jewish ritual of Kapparot where you grab a live chicken by the shoulder blades and move it around your head three times.

Religious norms, therefore, receive attacks on two fronts: high-level norms, such as "Don't steal," "Don't lie," etc., have been rightly deemed redundant by modern, civil society; and, low-level norms, such as dietary restrictions, seem redundant thanks to modern inventions, such as refrigerators.

But there is still this vast middle zone of norms, which may be the most crucial normative output of religion. For example, respect for the elderly is a norm that has to be taught. Look at any teenager, and you can tell they "innately" don't care for old people. Or consider adultery. In some cultures, the practice is taboo, in others, it's a cause for being executed, and still, in others, it's just something not talked about in polite conversation, but definitely practiced in private. What should be the rule be about adultery? The answer isn't self-evident.

Example: dating and relationship norms

The way we establish norms today is a simulation of how norms were established in the past. Instead of Sunday mass, we have the podcast. Instead of the priest, we have the therapist. And instead of one holy book, we have self-help books.

Self-help ...
RFC: COVID-19 Statistical Guilt
by Erhannis — 2020-08-04T06:46:16.090Z

(Updated 2020/08/08; appended to the bottom. New BLUF: "What's the expected total number of further C19 infections recursively resulting from a single infection, in the current USA environment?")

(Original post: )

BLUF: How many days of life would I be statistically costing others by taking four flights and some family vacation?

I live in Ohio, and my parents live in Arizona. A few months ago, my parents shared future plans to take a family trip. I don't think it even occurred to me to consider the future state of COVID-19 at the time of the trip - August was ages away, and the entirely implicit reasoning probably read "surely things will have quieted down". I bought plane tickets without really thinking about it. Now, all of a sudden, August is here, a plane flight is about two weeks away, and COVID-19 is worse than ever. If I cancel, my parents will be quite upset - my mom hates that I live so far away, and has been looking forward to this trip together for months. I am afraid to disappoint them. However, I am also aware that taking a plane risks catching and spreading COVID-19, endangering others' lives. I don't have known tools at hand to properly assess the risk I'd be incurring.

Here are some details:

1. The trip is about a week long.

2. There are two segments of the trip: one where I stay with my immediate family (4, including me) at home for a few days, and then one where we (and maybe 8-14 others; extended family) fly to my Grandma's timeshare suite at a mountain resort in Utah for several days. (Then fly back, and I fly back to Ohio maybe a day later.) The primary activity at the resort is likely to be hiking, possibly supplemented (for some individuals) with pool-going.

3. I've been heavily quarantining, and my family has been quarantining pretty well, I hear - perhaps we can assume for simplicity that my immediate family does not currently have COVID-19, and perhaps likewise for my extended family.

4. Sometime last year I bought about 10 N95 masks. (They got lost for a while, but were rediscovered a month or two ago. I'm unsure whether their importance for donation remains as high as it once was.) I could wear an N95 mask for the flights, and possibly provide them for my immediate family. (Actually, I think I also have a box of those corner-store surgical masks. Tried to donate t...
(Ir)rationality of Pascal's wager
by filozof3377@gmial.com — 2020-08-03T20:57:24.264Z

During the last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ,,Pascalian” themes, like the paradoxes generated by introducing infinities in ethics or decision theory. In this post I want to focus on Pascal’s wager (Hajek, 2018), and why it is (ir)rational to accept it.

Firstly, it seems to me that a huge part of responses to Pascal’s wager are just unsuccessful rationalizations, which people create to avoid the conclusion. It is common to see people who (a) claim that this conclusion is plainly absurd and just dismiss it without argument, or (b) people who try to give an argument which at first glance seems to work, but at the second glance it backfires and leads to even worse absurdities than the wager.

In fact it is not very surprising if we take into account the psychological studies showing how motivated reasoning and unconscious processes leading to cognitive biases are common (Haidt, 2001; Greene, 2007). Arguably, accepting the Pascal’s wager goes against at least a few of those biases (like scope insensitivity, risk aversion when dealing with small probabilities, even not to mention that the conclusion is rather uncomfortable).

Nevertheless, although I think that the arguments typically advanced against Pascal’s wager are not successful, it still may be rational not to accept the wager.

Here is why I think so.

I regard the expected utility theory as the right approach to making choices under uncertainty, even when dealing with tiny probabilities of the large outcomes. This is simply because it can be shown, that over long series of such choices following such strategy would pay off. However, this argument holds only over the long series of choices, when there is enough time for such improbable scenarios to occur.
For example, imagine a person, let’s call her Sue, who knows with absolute certainty that she has only one decision to make in her life, and after that she will magically disappear. She has a choice between two options.

Option A: 0,0000000000000000001 % probability of creating infinite value.

Option B: 99 % probability of creating of a huge, but finite amount of value.

I think that in this case, option B is the right choice.
However, if instead of having this one choice in her life Sue had to face infinitely many such choices over an infinitely long time, then I think the option A is the...
is gpt-3 few-shot ready for real applications?
by nostalgebraist — 2020-08-03T19:50:09.740Z

This is a lengthy reply to @the-moti​​‘s post here. Creating a new post to limit thread length, and so I can crosspost to LW.

@the-moti​​ says, in part:

This obviously raises two different questions: 1. Why did you think that no one would use few-shot learning in practice? 2. Why did other people think people would use few-shot learning in practice?
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on these two points.

—

Thanks for asking!

First of all, I want to emphasize that the GPT-3 paper was not about few-shot GPT-3 as a practical technology.

(This is important, because the paper is the one large body of quantitative evidence we have on few-shot GPT-3 performance.)

This is not just my take on it: before the OpenAI API was announced, all the discussion I saw took for granted that we were talking about a scientific finding and its broader implications. I didn’t see any commentator whose main takeaway was “wow, if I could do this few-shot thing right now, I could build amazing projects with it.”

Indeed, a common theme in critical commentary on my post was that I was too focused on whether few-shot was useful right now with this specific model, whereas the critical commentators were more focused on the implications for even larger models, the confirmation of scaling laws over a new parameter regime, or the illustration-in-principle of a kind of meta-learning. Gwern’s May newsletter is another illustrative primary source for the focus of the discussion in this brief “pre-API” period. (The API was announced on June 11.)

As I read it (perhaps benefitting from hindsight and discussion), the main points of the paper were

(1) bigger models are better at zero/few-shot (i.e. that result from the GPT-2 paper holds over a larger scale),

(2) more “shots” are better when you’re doing zero/few-shot,

(3) there is an interaction effect between 1+2, where larger models benefit more from additional “shots,”

(4) this could actually become a practical approach (even the dominant approach) in the future, as illustrated by the example of a very large model which achieves competitive results with few-shot on some tasks

The paper did not try to optimize its prompts – indeed its results are already being improved upon by API acolytes – and it didn’t say anything about techniques that will be common in any application, like composing together several few-shot “functions.” It didn’t talk about...
Solving Key Alignment Problems Group
by Logan Riggs — 2020-08-03T19:30:45.916Z

I want to map out all the open problems in Alignment; understand the key topics, how they relate and how the parts form a greater whole. I believe a small group of people who can notice when they're confused, can make substantial conceptual progress on many of the open problems. Besides, it sounds like a lot of fun.

To do this, I will have a 1-hr open meeting every week working on this. If you're reading this, you are free to join.

But wait, what would this look like?

Once a week, time TBD, we would call and go through a few questions, 5-minute timer style. Then discuss. For example:

Week 1:

1. Map out all of alignment from a first principles perspective. [Your solution should feel like it reasonably solves alignment. It can contain many "black boxes" that do the hard work, so spend extra time on opening up the black boxes and exploring them.] (30 minutes, then discuss)

2. Design images that explain the same information from 1 above. [You can use whatever tool you want, I will use draw.io] (10 minutes, then discuss/ post images in Discord)

Week 2: Vote on a specific topic to zoom in on and explore from first principles

Week 3: Literature Review of topic from Week 2

Week 4 on: TBD

[Specific questions and phrasings will change weekly based on feedback]

What if I won't be helpful?

Discussion will be on a volunteer basis. I expect there will even be too much talking (or not enough time to talk). You will not be expected or called out to tell everyone your answer. You can even write up your thoughts in the Discord throughout the week if that's how you'd like to contribute.

One hour/week won't amount to much

As mentioned, there is a Discord server attached. There will always be open problems to explore and work on the week between meetings. If you want to join, you will NOT be expected to work on anything in-between meetings, but I will (I only recommend you do that if you find the topic fun or interesting).

I would love to have a community of people focused on a specific topic, discussing and giving feedback. To me, a Discord server is useful for creative work since I have a lower standard for anything I write (as opposed to writing this post).

What if you waste time on dead ends?

I will post weekly on what we figured out in the last meeting, as well as post the questions for the next week. I am counting on the LW community to provide fe...
Cryonics Cost-Benefit Analysis
by niplav — 2020-08-03T17:30:42.307Z

cross-posted from niplav.site

Is cryonics
worth it, and if yes, should one
cryocrastinate
(i.e. postpone signing up for cryonics to a later date)? Betteridge's law
of headlines
only applies partially here: Yes, it is probably worth it (under plausible
assumptions $850k for a 20 year old,
and more for older people), and no,
cryocrastination is usually irrational (unless one doesn't experience
value drift, in which case cryocrastination
is rational until age 55). A cost-benefit analysis written in
Lua,
considering
neurocryopreservation
with Alcor. I also perform a Monte-Carlo
simulation using
Guesstimate,
and find that signing up for cryonics at age 20 is worth $18m
in the mean, median -$100k (90% confidence interval: -$2.16m,
$58.25m). It therefore seems recommendable to sign up for cryonics
immediately.

Cryonics Cost-Benefit Analysis

If I died, would I be rid of my senses?

Or will it retain, trapped within my corpse, in stasis?

If I died, would I be a woman in heaven?

Or would I fall asleep, not knowing what it’s like to feel alive?

If I died, would I begin with a new life?

Or would I be gone as quickly as the breath I give last?

If I died, would I be a woman in heaven?

Or would I fall asleep, not knowing what it’s like to feel alive?

— Patricia Taxxon, “Deconstruct” from “Foley Artist”, 2019

One day they woke me up

So I could live forever

It’s such a shame the same

Will never happen to you

— Jonathan Coulton, “Want You Gone” from “Portal 2: Songs to Test By (Volume 3)”, 2011

Many would-be cryonicists cryocrastinate, i.e. they put off signing
up for cryonics until a later point in their life. This has often
been explained by the fact that signing up for cryonics requires high
conscientiousness
and can be easily be delayed until another point in life.

I'll get around to doing it eventually

— person who was cremated

However, it hasn't yet been explored whether this procrastination might be
rational if eventually followed through with: Many cryonics organisations
have high membership fees, which might be avoided by waiting.

To find this out, I first present a point-estimate model of
whether (and if yes, when) to sign up for cryonics. The model is
written in Lua. I then proceed and create a
Guesstimate model to determine the
distribution of the expected value of signing up.

Other Cryonics Texts

This write-up is not intended as an introduction to the concept
...