trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Handicapping competitive games
by DanielFilan — 2021-07-22T03:00:00.498Z

[epistemic status: thing I thought of while falling asleep and just wrote up]

Suppose you’re playing a competitive game. By that, I mean a game where there are multiple players, and each is trying to win by beating the others. An example of a game like this is Go. But, if you think about it, soccer is also kind of like this: each ‘player’ is composed of a team of people, and the two ‘players’ are competing against each other. We’ll say that that also counts.

Sometimes, you’d like to play a competitive game with a friend or multiple friends, but the problem is that one of you is stronger than the other. It’s easy to see what this means in Go, and in the case of soccer, you could imagine that you’re part of a pre-set team, and so are your friends, and it wouldn’t be as fun to swap people between teams to even it out (perhaps because e.g. the teams are based on where you live). This is kind of sad because it means that by default, the stronger player or team will predictably win, which makes it a bit less fun. A way to get around this is by handicapping the stronger player: giving them some disadvantage so that the weaker player has a decent chance of winning, even if the stronger player tries their best. In Go, the standard way of doing this is to have the weaker player start with some well-placed stones already on the board. I don’t know how exactly this works in soccer - perhaps by having the stronger team play with fewer members than usual?

If you’re in this situation, but you don’t know the standard way to handicap - for instance, if you’re me and the game is soccer - it might be useful to have a taxonomy of ways to handicap games to choose between. Or if you’re bored of the standard way of handicapping, a taxonomy might inspire you to create new ideas. In this post, I’ll detail what I think is an exhaustive taxonomy.

To think about how to handicap competitive games, I find it helpful to think about what a competitive game is. I think that a competitive game is specified by the following things:

A starting state

A number of players in the game

A set of options for what the players can do at any point

A win condition

A ‘transition function’, which determines how the game state changes after each player does something

An ‘observability function’, which determines what each player can see about the game state
These all provide candidates to tweak. Le

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($1000 bounty) How effective are marginal vaccine doses against the covid delta variant? 
by Bird Concept — 2021-07-22T01:26:26.117Z

UPDATE: the bounty has now been awarded as follows:

$425 to Connor_Flexman
$300 to Josh Jacobson
$150 to JenniferRM/johnswentworth
$75 to ChristianKl
$50 to SoerenMind

===

Since I got vaccinated I’ve started working in-person, going to restaurants, travelling and whatever. But the delta variant might change this risk calculation. Some of the same buzz that got covid right early on, the first time around, is now buzzing about delta potentially being very bad.

So I’m exploring ways of responding to that. This time around I’d rather

stand up and fight

than lock myself in a house for a year. And so this question explores one possible approach.

There’s evidence that two vaccine doses are more effective than one (though there might be much higher diminishing returns than is commonly acknowledged). I’ve also heard that past infection confers marginal immunity even in the presence of vaccination. Further, as far as I understand, the 2-dose schedule for many vaccines is more “a common thing that we happened to test in the big trials” rather than “the dose level at which marginal benefit = marginal risk”. (And giving your population more than two doses is probably much harder logistically.)

Hence: getting more than the standard 1-2 vaccine doses might be a way to protect against delta.

I live in California, and we currently seem to have a large vaccine surplus. I heard a vague rumour about a friend basically just walking into a pharmacy and getting a 3rd shot. There’s also RADVAC, which you can make yourself.

So, if there is supply... how worthwhile is it to get more vaccine doses? Should you get a 3rd, 4th, … or even more? How does getting a further dose of the same vaccine compare to getting the first dose of a different vaccine?

I’m posting a bounty of $1000 for answers that change my mind on this question (maybe increasing to many times that if this proves valuable).

The ideal thing I want would be a graph with the x-axis showing # doses, and the y-axis reduction-vs-control of the following four parameters:

Symptomatic infection
Hospitalisation
Death
Long covid

(Answers are of course impacted by the combinatorial search space of dose spacing / dose number / dose size / vaccine type / various demographics, but I won’t make any special restrictions here for now)

I will pay at least $1000 for answers that help me get clarity on this, split...
Jaynesian interpretation - How does “estimating probabilities” make sense?
by  — 2021-07-21T21:36:27.691Z

In Professor Jaynes’ theory of probability, probability is the degree of plausibility about a thing given some knowledge and not an physical property of that thing.

However, I see people treating the probability of heads in a coin flip as a parameter that needs to be estimated. Even Professor Jaynes gives the impression that he is “estimating the probability” or looking for “the most plausible probability of heads” in page 164 of his book.

How does the idea of ”estimating a probability from data“ or finding the “most probable probability of heads in a coin flip given some data” make sense from this paradigm?

Thank you for your time
Ask Not "How Are You Doing?"
by Collisteru — 2021-07-21T17:53:47.216Z

Like the human body, English conversation retains certain vestigial features. Some of these are malignant, in that they impede lively discourse. Here I address the most common and damaging example I know of: the phrase, “How are you doing?”

This is a staple greeting. Throughout most of the United States and beyond, the phrase follows “hello” almost by reflex. It makes sense in theory. Asking about subjective well-being gives us immediate access to our conversation partner’s personal life, which supports building relationships. Furthermore, the question’s vagueness politely allows plenty of room to choose a topic.

This may be why the phrase has been widespread at least since Shakespeare1. Alas, far gone on the days of queen Gertrude’s response: “One woe doth tread upon another’s heel… ” Instead, the typical modern answer sounds something like this: “fine.” In fact, I rarely hear any other response.

Fine‽ I think, flabbergasted. You could have talked about anything! You could have launched into a rant about the weather or the nature of well-being in society! You could have pursued the opportunity to make an ally, spread an idea, or build rapport on common ground! Instead, you combust all the myriad branches of possibility with a single syllable: “fine”!

I should probably mention that, until very recently, I always made this mistake. Sometimes, an honest answer feels like a social gaffe. This wastes time and contributes nothing to breaking the ice. We might as well just leave it at “hello.”

Allow me to offer an alternative. The next time you greet someone, don’t resort to this inefficient ghost of a greeting. Don’t ask “how are you doing,” ask instead “what are you doing?”

This simple change has many benefits:

Its newness catches your conversation partner off-guard, luring them out of the chilly “stranger mode” of conversation and into a truly open discussion.
The focus lingers on their work. Rather than tear their attention from the task at hand, they can discuss it.
It’s concrete, which leads to better thinking habits.

In the spirit of balanced inquiry, let’s look at the drawbacks:

It draws long and expository conversations compared to the traditional “how are you doing” question. If your intent is acknowledgment rather than discussion, you may prefer “how.” However, I would object that asking someone about their health when you don’t actually care is dishonest. Maybe d

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Randomized Zettelkasten Test
by Josephine — 2021-07-21T17:21:01.057Z

Motivation and Method

I read the book How to Take Smart Notes a couple years ago and have tried to keep my notes together in a Zettelkasten ever since. I currently use Obsidian, which contains 2500 individual notes collected over two or three years - some abstract to encourage being hooked up to anything and some as concrete as possible to attain specific insight.

However, despite the enjoyment of keeping my notes in one place and looking at all of them in a big network, very few of my additions have come from connections between notes. I want to see if I've hit diminishing returns or if original insights are still available with this method.

To that end I'm generating 25 random numbers between 1 and 2500, collecting the results to make a toy Zettelkasten a hundredth the size of the full one, and seeing how many meaningful ideas can be developed from it. Playing fast and loose with priors here, a graph with 25 vertices can have a maximum of 300 edges, and by Sturgeon's Revelation I'd expect only 10% of these to be good. So: if I find 30 worthwhile connections or products, I'll be satisfied.

Now to roll.

The 1%-Zettelkasten

Satellites (onto-cartography) - ontological machines caught up in the "gravity" of "bright objects". (See this post for more details.)
Ancestors don't die young - for some definition of "young"; all of our ancestors lived long enough to reproduce.
Biennials - plants that take two years to fully grow. An important distinction if you ever need to plant crops for food.
"Death extinguishes envy" - a quote that stuck with me, though it's not fully true. Death removes us from the social world and solidifies a much kinder impression of us than the average person might have during our lives.
Diffuse responsibility - the well-discussed state where 100 people seeing a problem will do nothing because they each feel 1/100th the responsibility.
New senses make new media - speculation. A new medium can be developed by finding some new material or way of arranging things, but if it were possible for ex. to feel microscopic etchings with one's fingers I would expect a new artform to arise from it.
Phenomenological barriers are symmetric - just as cisgender people can't fully feel what it would be like to be transgender (because to have the experience with any fidelity would make them no longer cisgender), transgender people can't completely fathom b

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The shoot-the-moon strategy
by jchan — 2021-07-21T16:19:48.226Z

Sometimes you can solve a problem by intentionally making it "worse" to such an extreme degree that the problem goes away. Real-world examples:

I accidentally spilled cooking oil on my shoe, forming an unsightly stain. When soap and scrubbing failed to remove it, I instead smeared oil all over both shoes, turning them a uniform dark color and thus "eliminating" the stain.

Email encryption can conceal the content of messages, but not the metadata (i.e. the fact that Alice sent Bob an email). To solve this, someone came up with a protocol where every message is always sent to everyone, though only the intended recipient can decrypt it. This is hugely inefficient but it does solve the problem of metadata leakage.

Hypothetical examples:

If I want to avoid spoilers for a sports game that I wasn't able to watch live, I can either assiduously avoid browsing news websites, or I can use a browser extension that injects fake headlines about the outcome so I don't know what really happened.

If a politician knows that an embarassing video of them is about to leak, they can blunt its effect by releasing a large number of deepfake videos of themself and other politicians.

The common theme here is that you're seemingly trying to get rid of X, but what you really want is to get rid of the distinction between X and not-X. If a problem looks like this, consider whether shooting the moon is a viable strategy.
Reward splintering for AI design
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2021-07-21T16:13:17.917Z

This post will look at how model splintering can be used by an AI to extend human-specified rewards beyond its training environment, and beyond the range of what humans could do.

The key points are:

Most descriptive labels (eg "happiness", "human being") describe collections of correlated features, rather than fundamental concepts.

Model splintering is when the correlated features come apart, so that the label no longer applies so well.

Reward splintering is when the reward itself is defined on labels that are splintering.

We humans deal with these issues ourselves in various ways.

We may be able program an AI to deal with these in similar ways, using our feedback as needed, and extending beyond when we can no longer provide it with useful feedback.

Section 1 will use happiness as an example, defining it as a bundle of correlated features and see what happens when these start to splinter. Section 2 defines model and reward splintering in more formal terms. And finally section 3 will analyse how an AI could detect reward splintering and deal with it.

1. What is happiness? A bundle of correlated features

How might we define happiness today? Well, here's one definition:

Happiness is that feeling that comes over you when you know life is good and you can't help but smile. It's the opposite of sadness. Happiness is a sense of well-being, joy, or contentment. When people are successful, or safe, or lucky, they feel happiness.

We can also include some chemicals in the brain, such as serotonin, dopamine, or oxytocin. There are implicit necessary features there as well, that are taken as trivially true today: happiness is experienced by biological beings, that have a continuity of experience and of identity. Genuine smiles are good indicators of happiness, as is saying "I am happy" in surveys.

So, what is happiness, today? Just like rubes and bleegs, happiness is a label assigned to a bunch of correlated features. You can think of it a similar to the "g factor", an intelligence measure that is explicitly defined as a correlation of different cognitive task abilities.

And, just like rubes and bleggs, those features need not stay correlated in general environments. We can design or imagine situations where they easily come apart. People with frozen face muscles can't smile, but can certainly be happy. Would people with anterograde amnesia be truly happy? What about s...
Why is Kleros valued so low?
by ChristianKl — 2021-07-21T13:50:11.732Z

Kleros provides a system that allows smart contract in natural language to be written by letting randomly drafted juries evaluate the contract. It seems to me that this principle is incredibly powerful for all sorts of real world applications whether it's arbitrating the outcome of a prediction market or making sure that the events listed in the prediction market follow rules spelled out in natural language.

At the moment it seems like Ethereums transaction costs are still limiting the utility of Kleros but either further progress in Ethereum or a Ethereum Virtual Machine on another chain is likely soon able to allow Kleros to provide the services more cheaply.

Kleros Market cap is currently at $58,597,050 (with $73,236,896 fully diluted) which is relatively low compared to other crypto-assets especially given that it has potentially so much real world use-cases compared to a lot of other blockchain projects without real world usecases. Either there's some argument against Kleros that I'm not seeing or it should be valued 100-1000X of what it's current value happens to be.
My Marriage Vows
by Vanessa Kosoy — 2021-07-21T10:48:24.443Z

I'm getting married. We decided to take marriage vows very seriously, and write vows that we will be fully committed to uphold. These vows are going to be a commitment no weaker than any promise I ever made or any contract I ever signed. Therefore, it is very important to avoid serious errors in their content.

I'm interested to hear feedback of the form "making these vows might turn out to be a big mistake for you, and here is why"[1] or of the form "here is how the spirit of these vows can be implemented better". Given that this is a community which nurtures security mindset, I have great expectations :) More precisely, I am less interested in extreme nitpicking / rule-lawyering, since that should be neutralized by the Vow of Good Faith anyway (but tell me if you think I'm wrong about this!) and more in serious problems that can arise in at least semi-realistic situations. (Of course, since many of us here expect a Singularity in a few decades, semi-realistic is not a very high bar ;)

Without further ado, the vows:

[EDIT 2022-07-15: The following text has been edited to match the final version of the Vows (that we took on 2021-08-29)]

I, [name], solemnly pledge to [name] three sacred Vows as I take [pronoun] to be my [spouse]. These vows are completely sincere, literal, binding and irrevocable from the moment both of us take the Vows, unless the marriage is dissolved or my [spouse] unconscionably[2] breaks [pronoun]’s own Vows which I believe in all likelihood will never happen. Let everyone present be my witness.

The First Vow is that of Honesty. I will never set out to deceive my [spouse] on purpose without [pronoun]’s unambiguous consent[3], without exception. I will also never withhold information that [pronoun] would in hindsight prefer to know[4]. The only exception to the latter is when this information was given to me in confidence by a third party as part of an agreement which was made in compliance with all Vows[5]. If for any reason I break my vow, I will act to repair the error as fast as reasonably possible.

The Second Vow is that of Concord. Everything I do will be according to the policy which is the Nash solution to the bargaining problem defined by my [spouse]’s and my own priors and utility functions, with the disagreement point set at the counterfactual in which we did not marry. I will act as if we made all precommitments that would a

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Is there a reasonable reading according to which Baric, Shi et al 2015 isn't gain-of-function research?
by ChristianKl — 2021-07-21T08:19:12.973Z

From the A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence by Baric, Shi et al:

Wild-type SARS-CoV (Urbani), mouse-adapted SARS-CoV (MA15) and chimeric SARS-like CoVs were cultured on Vero E6 cells (obtained from United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases), grown in Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium (DMEM) (Gibco, CA) and 5% fetal clone serum (FCS) (Hyclone, South Logan, UT) along with antibiotic/antimycotic (Gibco, Carlsbad, CA). DBT cells (Baric laboratory, source unknown) expressing ACE2 orthologs have been previously described for both human and civet; bat Ace2 sequence was based on that from Rhinolophus leschenaulti, and DBT cells expressing bat Ace2 were established as described previously8. Pseudotyping experiments were similar to those using an HIV-based pseudovirus, prepared as previously described10, and examined on HeLa cells (Wuhan Institute of Virology) that expressed ACE2 orthologs.

To me building chimeric viruses and then infact human cells (HeLa cells are human cells) looks like dangerous gain-of-function research. Fauci seems to argue that someone the NIH is able to define this work as not being gain-of-function research. To me this redefinition seems to be the bureaucratic way they circumvent the gain-of-function moratorium. Before the moratorium was imposed Fauci was arguing against it and the moratorium wasn't imposed by anyone in the NIH or the HHS but the Office of Science and Technology Policy. To me that looks like a way to evade safety regulation by the NIH by dedefining terms because the NIH didn't like the moratorium.

This question is about more then just assigning guilt for things that happened in 2015. If we want to prevent further risk, getting the NIH to accept that growing chimeric viruses that infect human cells is what the gain-of-function regulation is supposed to prevent seems to me to be very important.

It's likely also a good case study for evading safety regulation and we should think about it in other context as well. If we end up with AI safety regulation, how do we prevent the people causing problems from just redefining the terms so that it doesn't apply to them?

If anyone has a defense of not classifying this work as gain-of-function research I'm also happy to hear that.
The Utility Function of a Prepper
by Alex Hollow — 2021-07-21T02:26:19.214Z
Link: https://alexhollow.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/the-utility-function-of-a-prepper/

Looking at the top posts on /r/prepping right now, you can find these two images:

Various "survival" gear. Good luck carrying all that wet food!

I think this one is cute, and I might talk more about it in another post.

I used to think that people who are stockpiling food, water, and guns out of fear of are acting irrationally. But then I realized maybe they just have different utility functions than me.

I think preppers have a satisficing utility function. As an exaggerated example, imagine a utility function where you got 1 utility each day from having enough food and water, and 0 utility from not having enough food or water. If you had that utility function, you really should start stockpiling food and water immediately!

Arguments about prepping are often have the general form of a prepper saying "it improves the worst-case outcomes in lots of scenarios" and a non-prepper saying "but it doesn't maximize expected value!". If you accept that the source of the disagreement is preppers having satisficing utility functions, and non-preppers having maximizing utility functions, you can see the futility of that line of argument. Telling someone their utility function is wrong won't get them to change their utility function.

Once I started thinking about preppers as satisficers, I realized why they are so worried about civilizational collapse. If you feel reliant on other people to provide you with the resources you need to meet your satisficing threshold, then reducing that reliance would be a high priority.

While I have you here and we are talking about prepping, I'm going to try to convince you to store a little water in your house. Water is one of the largest (by volume) necessary inputs to human life. If the water main burst in your house, it would be highly inconvenient and would require moving. If a natural disaster took out running water in your neighborhood or city, it might be a humanitarian crisis. Buying some large jugs of water and stashing them under your bed is a very cheap, low-cost intervention that has a decent chance of greatly improving your life if you lose access to running water.