trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Introducing Metaforecast: A Forecast Aggregator and Search Tool
by NunoSempere — 2021-03-07T19:03:35.920Z

Introduction

The last few years have seen a proliferation of forecasting platforms. These platforms differ in many ways, and provide different experiences, filters, and incentives for forecasters. Some platforms like Metaculus and Hypermind use volunteers with prizes, others, like PredictIt and Smarkets are formal betting markets.

Forecasting is a public good, providing information to the public. While the diversity among platforms has been great for experimentation, it also fragments information, making the outputs of forecasting far less useful. For instance, different platforms ask similar questions using different wordings. The questions may or may not be organized, and the outputs may be distributions, odds, or probabilities.

Fortunately, most of these platforms either have APIs or can be scraped. We’ve experimented with pulling their data to put together a listing of most of the active forecasting questions and most of their current estimates in a coherent and more easily accessible platform.

Metaforecast

Metaforecast

is a free & simple app that shows predictions and summaries from 10+ forecasting platforms. It shows simple summaries of the key information; just the immediate forecasts, no history. Data is fetched daily. There’s a simple string search, and you can open the advanced options for some configurability. Currently between all of the indexed platforms we track ~2100 active forecasting questions, ~1200 (~55%) of which are on Metaculus. There are also 17,000 public models from Guesstimate.

One obvious issue that arose was the challenge of comparing questions among platforms. Some questions have results that seem more reputable than others. Obviously a Metaculus question with 2000 predictions seems more robust than one with 3 predictions, but less obvious is how a Metaculus question with 3 predictions compares to one from Good Judgement Superforecasters where the number of forecasters is not clear, or to estimates from a Smarkets question with £1,000 traded. We believe that this is an area that deserves substantial research and design experimentation. In the meantime we use a star rating system. We created a function that estimates reputability as “stars” on a 1-5 system using the forecasting platform, forecast count, and liquidity for prediction markets. The estimation came from volunteers acquainted with the various forecasting platf...
Thoughts on the Repugnant Conclusion
by Tomás B. — 2021-03-07T19:00:37.056Z

When we accept the repugnant conclusion, we trade lower average utility for greater total utility. This is unavoidable. But the image the repugnant conclusion evokes in many people's minds (of trading higher average toil and squalor for an economic surplus that is spent creating more agents with lives barely worth living) is not unavoidable, and seems to me pretty unlikely, as to the extent one can create economic surplus without experience-moments, or with non-negative experience-moments, you will.

That is, the discourse on this topic commonly assumes that the agents creating the instrumental wealth of society must also be the agents that embody the value of society. This is true now, but seems unlikely to hold in the future, as unlikely as a paperclip maximizer whose resource-acquisition robots are, also, made of paperclips. It is possible that one cannot create surplus without negative experience-moments, but this seems, at least, not obviously true.

Also, the phrase "barely worth living" is evocative in ways that are not useful. It is much clearer to reword this statement to its more general form: "barely meeting the criteria for me valuing them."

For me this rewording takes the teeth out of the statement, as any thing that optimizes will optimize for the simplest structure that qualifies as valuable to its utility function. This is just trivially true and not disheartening. If you are not happy with the minimal structure a utility function optimizes for, it is the wrong utility function.

Whatever eudaimonia is, it is just a pattern of matter and energy evolving through time. An agent optimizing for eudaimonia has a light-cone that they need to transform into a eudaimonic shape. And how the light-cone is sculpted depends on your definition of eudaimonia.

So what is the real trade-off then? For want of a better word, the trade off seems to be the size of the "soul" of each agent you create. And this will ultimately depend how big the "minimal-viable soul" is. In the limit of large souls, you get a utility monster that uses most of the surplus of the light-cone. Should small souls qualify, then a universe full of joyously ecstatic shrimp may be on the table.

However, the world of people toiling at the Malthusian limit barely eking out an existence does not seem, at least to me, to be the obvious prescription of the repugnant c...
Pragmatic Cutoffs 
by Borasko — 2021-03-07T18:35:23.490Z

[Just an Idea I’ve been thinking about, I would love some feedback on improving it, or any relevant studies over this I don’t know about]

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes I think social problems don’t matter as much, especially if I am not in direct control to change them. I can disagree with a politician, but if I don’t live in their district I’m going to usually jump to “I don’t care what they do because I have no power to enforce their actions”. Social Norming around common values / pointing out those who disagree with our values aside, I think most news day to day is a distraction. It matters only because people care about it, but if nobody cared about it then some obvious flaws in society would go unnoticed. We do need to catch false negatives but there are also many false positives that our attention latches onto and doesn’t seem to let go. Most events seem to be memory holed as well, I can usually ignore news because the issue de jour will be forgotten in a week, by almost everybody. But at the same time seeing some temporary news may be beneficial for a better model of long term trends of the world. But that loops back to if I can’t use any of that new information pragmatically, it almost becomes worthless knowledge. How do I better filter useless from useful? I understand I can’t truly decide what might be worthless and what might not be. Random viruses pop all the time, covid was known about in late 2019, few cared until it hit a certain threshold of importance.

So I wonder at what point my threshold is set so that something becomes “useful”, as in I can use it to strengthen social ties, collect relevant world information, or actually use the knowledge for a project. This seems like it can be solved by Bayes updating, but since I have no clue how I usually weight my incoming stimulus, I’m lost for understanding.

I had recently read a page about a politician that seems to be doing things I don’t approve of. But considering that politician is far away it's tough for me to care. But considering politician problems seem to operate on social reality rather than physical reality, my response could change things. If everybody in the world wanted this politician gone, they would be gone. My help would eventually affect something, but right ...
The three existing ways of explaining the three characteristics of existence
by Kaj_Sotala — 2021-03-07T18:20:24.298Z

The following was originally intended to be part of the introductory post to my series on the three characteristics of existence, explaining how I disliked most existing explanations to the 3Cs and what my series was trying to do differently. I ended up cutting most of this excerpt in order to make the post shorter, but have since then occasionally found myself wanting to refer back to this explanation. So I'm posting it here now.

Some of the content in this post may be previously familiar, because I ended up re-using some of the paragraphs here to explain slightly different points in the actual final introduction.

On the nature of insights and explanations

Most explanations of the three characteristics that I have seen have fallen into one of two categories, both of which I am unhappy with: either purely intellectual explanations, or no-explanation explanations.

The problem with intellectual explanations

The first style attempts to explain the 3Cs on the level of intellectual theory. This wouldn’t necessarily be bad by itself: after all, my article is also an intellectual theory. The problem arises when they are discussed purely as theories, without making the connection to human experience.

For example, a common way of describing one aspect of no-self goes along the lines of “You are not your thoughts, because you can observe your thoughts, and you can’t be something that you can observe”. If this is viewed purely as an intellectual position, it is easy to think of a counterargument for it. For example, we can write a computer program which happens to internally assign information about its memory use to a variable called memory_use, and then monitors the content of that variable to make sure that it is not using too much memory. According to the argument we just heard, the information that the program stored in the variable memory_use wouldn’t be a part of the program, because the program can monitor memory_use. But this is clearly incorrect, so the argument is false: there can be parts of you which observe other parts of you, while all being “you”.

The problem here is that the 3Cs are not abstract intellectual claims. Any written explanations of them are trying to point at things which are true about our minds, but which violate some of the implicit assumptions that most human brains tend to run on. When a writer says that “you can’t be something that you can o...
Unconvenient consequences of the logic behind the second law of thermodynamics
by Marco Discendenti — 2021-03-07T18:14:02.277Z

Let's consider a simple universe consisting of an ideal gas inside a box (which means a number of massive points behaving as prescribed by Newton's physics with completely elastic collisions).

After the system reaches the thermodynamic equilibrium you could ask if it will stay forever in this equilibrium state, the answer turns out to be negative: Poincarè recurrence Theorem applies and we can be sure that the system will go far from equilibrium again and again given a sufficiently long "life" for this universe. Therefore entropy in this universe will be a fluctuating function like this:

If you are patient enough you would see

countinuous micro-fluctuations
occasional slightly bigger fluctuations
rare "not-so-small" fluctioations
extremely rare medium-big fluctuation
unconceiveably rare super-big fall of entropy like this

The interesting thing about these fluctuations is that their graph would look almost the same if you reverse the time (and this is because the underlying physics laws followed by the particles are time-symmetric). If you started in a special low-entropic configuration (for example the gas was concentrated) your reference to distinguish the past from the future could be the increasing of entropy at least at the very first moment until you reached the equilibrium. However if you wait long enough after the equilibrium is reached you would see the graph reaching again any possible level of low entropy so there is really nothing special in the low entropy at the beginning.

So this toy universe is actually symmetric in time, there is nothing inside it that would make a particular direction of time different from the other.

Now let's consider our real actual universe. Like the toy universe it seems we have again time-symmetric laws of physics applied in a far more complex system of particles. Again if we are asked to distinguesh the past from the future we rely our decision on the direction of increasing entropy but like before it could be misleading: maybe our universe is fluctuating too and we are just inside a particular super-big fluctuation, so there is nothing special about low entropy that forces us to put it in the "past": it will eventually happen also in the future, again and again. Furthermore if we are inside a fluctuation we have no way to tell if we are inside the decreasing part rather than the increasing part of the fluctua...
The average North Korean mathematician
by Malmesbury — 2021-03-07T17:28:40.094Z
Link: https://www.telescopic-turnip.net/essays/the-average-north-korean-mathematician/

Here are the top-fifteen countries ranked by how well their teams do at the International Math Olympiads:

When I first saw this ranking, I was surprised to see that North Koreans have such an impressive track record, especially when you factor in their relatively small population. One possible interpretation is that East Asians are just particularly good at mathematics, just like in the stereotypes, even when they live in one of the world's worst dictatorships.

But I don't believe that. In fact, I believe North Koreans are, on average, particularly bad at math. More than 40% of the population is undernourished. Many of the students involved in the IMOs grew up in the 1990s, during the March of Suffering, when hundreds of thousands of North Koreans died of famine. That is not exactly the best context to learn mathematics, not to mention the direct effect of nutrients on the brain. There does not seem to be a lot of famous North Korean mathematicians either (there is actually a candidate from the North Korean IMO team who managed to escape during the 2016 Olympiads in Hong-Kong. He is now living in South Korea. I wish him to become a famous mathematician). Thus, realistically, if all 18 years-old from North Korea were to take a math test, they would probably score much worse than their South Korean neighbors. And yet, Best Korea reaches almost the same score with only half the source population. What is their secret?

This piece on the current state of mathematics in North Korea gives it away:

“The entire nation suffered greatly during and after the March of Suffering, when the economy collapsed. Yet, North Korea maintained its educational system, focusing on the gifted and special schools such as the First High Schools to preserve the next generation. The limited resources were concentrated towards gifted students. Students were tested and selected at the end of elementary school.”

In that second interpretation, the primary concern of the North Korean government is to produce a few very brilliant students every year, who will bring back medals from the Olympiads and make the country look good. The rest of the population's skills at mathematics are less of a concern.

When we receive new information, we update our beliefs to keep them compatible with the new observations, doing an informal version of Bayesian updating. Before learning about the North Korean IMO ...
Teaching to Compromise
by Martin Sustrik — 2021-03-07T13:57:15.010Z

I was reading interview with Giscard d'Estaing about drafting of European Constitution and a this section stood out:

The session which was not good was the Youth Convention. It’s bizarre, it’s strange. Firstly, it was not young in spirit. [Laughs] That was what they’d been chosen for. It consisted of squabbles between bodies about holding posts. They spent their time discussing the role they would attribute to one another in the system. And very little came out of it. This made me rather worried, not about the young people of Europe, because there were [only] 105 of them, but about how representative the systems were. Because I said to myself that what was there wasn’t ‘youth’, for youth is much freer, much more imaginative, it takes an interest in two or three things, and if it talks about them, it speaks with feeling. So there was a kind of doubt about whether or not young people were represented by organisational systems.

That came as a surprise but giving it two more seconds of thought, it should hardly be surprising. Young people are much more likely to view world in simplified, black-and-white way. They are more likely to support extreme positions, be it communism, fascism or yet something else. The countries with young populations are more likely to engage in war. Therefore, one should not expect young people to fare too well in an endeavor - such as drafting a constitution - that requires subtle compromises.

That, in turn, made me think about how the art of compromise is taught to children. It's definitely not taught as part of the curriculum. Neither it's clear whether that's even possible. In the past one learned to compromise by having siblings and by having to live with them, sharing the room and sharing to toys. Nowadays, when one child per family is the norm, this learning opportunity doesn't exist any more. Parents aren't kid's equals and so compromising with them doesn't count. At the same time, society getting more wealthy is not conductive to learning to compromise. If some other kid has a toy you are interested in, you are not going to haggle about it. You just ask your parents to buy you the same toy.

Then I thought of the culture: We learn from fairy tales. We learn from books. We learn from movies.

However, the books, where, in the grand finale, Gandalf strikes a clever compromise with Sauron are in short supply.

Quite the opposite, most ...
Bakeoff
by jefftk — 2021-03-07T01:30:05.751Z

For most of the past week Lily has been trying to persuade us to have
a cooking competition. Her initial idea involved kids cooking
unassisted, but after talking through ways I saw this going poorly she
decided she was ok with teams. This morning she said it was time, and
declared it would be Lily + Jeff vs Anna + Julia.

Unfortunately, Anna was only interested in being a judge. After
extended discussion Lily determined that we would be a team and Julia
would compete as an individual. Luckily for Lily, when Julia woke up
she was up for participating.

Lily started by making a list of the allowed ingredients:

Since we only have one non-vegan oven we weren't going to have things
ready at the same time, and Julia wanted to eat hers for breakfast
anyway; we decided she'd have the oven first. She was enough faster
that she was done with the oven before Anna and I were even close to
ready to put ours in.

Julia made chocolate popovers:

Lily and I made a sponge cake with chocolate buttercream frosting:

The cake was a clear judge's favorite:

Lily: does it win?

Anna: yes!

Comment via: facebook
Contrarian Writing Advice
by lsusr — 2021-03-07T00:23:30.523Z

Daniel Kokotajlo points out that I write in ways that directly contradict standard writing advice.

Importance > Truth

Most writing revolves around whether x is true. My writing revolves around whether x is important. If x is unimportant then you should not bother writing whether x is true.

What you think about is more important than what you think. Most writing implies "we should talk about x". My writing often implies "we should not talk about x".

Clean logical chains

A single logical argument is sufficient to prove the truth value of a statement. Additional arguments are redundant. If I want to prove something is true then I write my best argument and stop. This maximizes cruxiness.

Cruxiness is a weakness a debate, which is why you don't see it in persuasive writing. Debates are dirty. A clean argument has nothing left to take away.

Write for an intelligent audience

No matter how carefully I write, there is always a chance someone will misinterpret it. When I spell things out so clearly only an idiot could misinterpret my words, the comments get worse because idiots misinterpret my words. On the other hand, when I fill my writing with differential equations, the only people with anything stupid to say are mathematicians and physics PhDs because they are the only ones confident enough to say anything at all. A lower bound is established.

There is a principle of marketing where you don't want to advertise your products to people who won't like them because then people will complain about you which is bad. Dumb people are less likely to misunderstand my complicated ideas when I abstain from dumbing them down.

Few Quotes

If I quote George Orwell then I imply that I couldn't come up with anything better to write than George Orwell. The reader should just read George Orwell instead.

Another reason to use quotes is to pass the buck. You can borrow authority on startups by quoting the expert Paul Graham. It's better to be an expert yourself. Einstein didn't need to quote Newton when he wrote about relativity.

Quotes are useful when they encapsulate someone else's large body of work. Such a reference functions like a DLL (dynamic link library).

Conclusion

The human brain is an opaque mass of connections. You cannot fully insulate the lies you tell from your model of reality. Persuasion is like lying. Pandering to others gunks up your internal model of reality.

I writ...
Noticing and Overcoming Bias
by Neel Nanda — 2021-03-06T21:06:36.495Z

Introduction

There’s a classic optical illusion about two squares on a chessboard. Square B looks significantly lighter, but they’re really the same shade - my mind is automatically correcting for the perceived shadow.

I don’t think this particular quirk of the eye is that interesting. But I think there is a valuable lesson to take from this illusion. Look at the picture, bearing in mind that the two squares are the same colour, and try to will yourself to see them as the same thing.

If you’re anything like me, this is utterly impossible. My eyes are a lens through which I perceive this picture, and they have a flaw. And to perceive the true world, I can’t fix this lens - I need to learn to work around this flawed lens, and find a different way to understand the ground truth.

This is a post about biases, how I think about them, and how I try to overcome them. And this lesson is key to understanding biases, because my mind is the lens through which I view the world. And biases are the flaws within that lens. And I cannot think my way out of a bias, or overcome this flaw with sheer force of will. It is insufficient to just be aware of my biases and to continue life as normal. To overcome biases, I need to learn when not to trust my own mind, and when to find work arounds to find a different way to access the ground truth.

Having true beliefs is a key sub-goal for essentially everything I care about, and biases are one of the main things holding me back. Overcoming bias is important. But it’s hard. If I want to find truth, there are times when I’ll need to believe things that feel intuitively wrong. Because my intuitions are the lens through which I find truth, and this lens has flaws. This is a difficult skill, and a constant balancing act, and I’m going to try to outline my thoughts on how to achieve this.

Identifying Bias

The first step is finding your biases!

A classic approach here is what I call the Laundry List of Biases approach. There are long lists of biases, with various snappy names and motivating examples. There is value in this, I think these biases are very real, and important to be aware of! And naming things makes them easier to understand and recognise.

But I’m personally not a big fan of this approach. I find this easily frames bias as an academic thing, something to be understood in the...