trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Covid 5/27: The Final Countdown
by Zvi — 2021-05-27T12:30:02.360Z

(Personal note: My Facebook account was hacked. Attacker has not contacted me, and deleted my name from the profile. Since I am already Against Facebook I do not view this as a great loss unless it leads to further trouble, but readers should be aware that for now I have no Facebook account. If I don’t get it back, I may or may not create a new one.)

We are now a second week into The Great Unmasking, with no sign of trouble in the case numbers. While it ain’t over till it’s over and I’m not quite prepared yet to outright declare victory. On reflection my criteria for V-A day is ‘I notice I am acting the exact same way I would if I was unvaccinated, provided everyone else was OK with that’ and we’re definitely not there yet. Still, it seems likely that in America it’s all over but the shouting and I see a lady preparing to sing.

At that point, we’ll potentially need to worry about future seasonal concerns if not enough people get vaccinated and we return to the full old normal, and we’ll need to keep an eye on variants, but that’s about it.

With numbers declining and life starting to return to normal, talk turned to the question of whether Covid-19 leaked from a lab, and potentially originated from gain of function research. Once considered a vile, racist conspiracy theory to be ruthlessly censored and scorned, it is now being officially investigated and is widely considered highly likely. We’ve seen this kind of Official Facts transformation before, and things are following the standard script. There’s a section on it, but in general I’d still hope to keep this mostly out of the column going forward.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction (now using Johns Hopkins numbers fully going forward): Positivity rate of 2.7% (down 0.3%) and deaths fall by 8%.

Result: Positivity rate of 2.5% (down 0.5%) and deaths fall by 10%.

Prediction: Positivity rate of 2.2% (down 0.3%) and deaths fall by 9%. Continued steady progress, with a little hedging in case we got out in front of things a bit.

Deaths

I deleted 400 deaths, 300 from Oklahoma and 100 from New Mexico, that were clearly reporting previous deaths rather than new data. Oklahoma reports weekly so there’s no way to know the real number, and I left it on the high end of possible. New Mexico had a day with 114 deaths so taking away most of those seems reasonable. That resulted in...
Donating Bitcoin to Crisis Zones - Is there a platform collating and verifying public key address for individuals in conflict zones which allows donors to send Bitcoin directly to them? 

by Siddhartha Gautama — 2021-05-27T08:20:04.315Z

I have been doing a lot of research on the human rights potential of peer to peer transactions and examining recent use cases in the likes of Nigeria, Belarus, Iran, Palestine, and Argentina. Considering the decreasing marginal utility of fiat currency donations to established aid organisations (e.g. bottlenecks, bureaucratic inefficiencies) the idea of donating directly to people in need is very attractive, especially where they may be the subject of capital controls or frozen bank accounts due to political/monetary tyranny.

I'm wondering if there is a mechanism or an organisation verifying the identities behind public key addresses on the blockchain in order to provide comfort to donors that their direct peer to peer transaction is going to worthy recipients. The identification process would only need to verify the needful legitimacy of the recipient, rather than reveal personal details that may compromise their safety/security.

It's a project I would like to work on and contribute to.
What's your peace plan?
by CraigMichael — 2021-05-26T23:26:42.146Z

I wrote a short form when the current Israel–Palestine hostilities started a few weeks ago. In retrospect, I was taking entirely the wrong point of view. I was thinking about it more like a r/AmITheAsshole post where it was about which side was worse. The only difference being I believed none of the typical judgements applied because the situation was too old and complicated.

In my defense, most of the world seems to be talking about this conflict in a "who is the asshole?" way. So, maybe it just rubbed off on me? Anyway, if you're similarly afflicted, I would coach you avoid the polarizing "which side is the bigger asshole?" debate and reframe it as "what the best plan for peace?"

This may be an odd comparison, but hear me out. Julia was recently on Conversations with Coleman discussing her new book that advocates for "scout mindset" over "solider mindset" in many circumstances. When asked if "scout" was always superior to "solider" Julia said she didn't know, and remarked at how she felt a weight lifted off her shoulders by not putting her self in a situation where she always had to defend scout mindset as superior to solider mindset.

I also feel like a weight was lifted off of me by not having to defend or attack one side, but rather to think about what the most viable plans for peace are.

(My only caveat would be if a "peace" plan is a world without Israelis or a world without Palestinians, I move that your plan be reconsidered.)

There are people who have spent entire careers trying to solve this problem. I'm not going to claim that I know better than they do. But in the spirit of the market place of ideas and encouraging discussion, I'll share my current thoughts.

2000 Camp David Summit and Clinton Parameters

I'm slightly embarrassed that I knew so little about he 2000 Camp David Summit, because it was so close to succeeding. Thinking things over the last few weeks my point of view has shifted towards something close to The Clinton Parameters in terms of identifying the underpinning points for negotiation and providing a direction for discussing them. (I see them as both an ideological middle ground between the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and the 2020 Trump Peace Plan, but also tactically superior for negotiation as they're not a take-it-or-leave-it plan). I believe they're underappreciated and worth revisiting in this context, rec...
The Anti-Carter Basilisk
by Jon Gilbert — 2021-05-26T22:56:18.818Z

In 1983, astrophysicist Brandon Carter proposed the "Doomsday argument" that supposes we are "likely" living near the end of humankind just before the species dies out. He reasoned that since most species tend to die out suddenly after a period of exponential increase, therefore if humans will also follow this pattern, then if you randomly select a single human lifespan from the pool of all human lives, it is most likely to occur during the final peak before the doomsday.

Cirkovic and Milosevic-Zdjelar pointed out in 2003 that Carter's argument did not seem to consider it likely for human beings to colonize other worlds successfully. Indeed, as any Elon Musk would say, we can increase the odds of surviving a doomsday event on Earth by becoming spacefaring race.

Now in the wake of Oumouamoua and the recent serious attention to the question of spacefaring species generated by the US DoD's press releases about certain UFO videos, it got me to realize a disturbing implication of humankind succeeding in spreading beyond Earth.

Now assume:

we send out 10 colony ships with 10,000 SoB (souls on board) in cryo-sleep to form 10 new colonies

each of these colonies in turn does the same as soon as they can

this progresses forward with each new colony sending out 10 ships at the same time as the others

each colony averages out at 10 billion humans before each colony ships reaches its destinations

this continues until we colonize all the earth-like worlds in this galaxy, totaling 1 billion

Through this we'd reach a moment where the 10th round of colony ships must all be sent out of the Milky Way to some distant galaxies, requiring millions of years of travel, during which it seems feasible for all the existing human colonies to meet doom or evolve away from being human long before the 10th round of colony ships reaches their destinations.

Now if the cryo-sleep system allows for lucid dreaming that seems like waking reality, and especially if it allows for something like an interconnected VR reality shared by all the SoB, then seems that to follow the same logic as Carter, given the length of time humans would live on these colony ships and how many of us there would be, then it's likely not that we are living just before doomsday but rather that we are all in cryo-sleep, living in a simulation as we travel between galaxies.

If that's the case then it begs the question, "Why ...
Is ("Chemical Imbalance" => Depression) an example of fake causality?
by const LIZARDMAN — 2021-05-26T22:55:53.058Z

I'm referring to fake causality as described in Eliezer's post, here.

I've often heard it said that "depression is a chemical imbalance", or that depression may be caused by biochemistry. But isn't everything we experience- every emotion (or lack thereof), manifest physically in the brain as a chemical state, regardless of the cause? What is the predictive value of saying depression is caused by biochemistry?

Seems like there must be a reason for that chemical state in the first place, whether it be life events, something you ate, a pathogen, genetics, or whatever it may be.
List of good AI safety project ideas?
by Aryeh Englander — 2021-05-26T22:36:07.910Z

Can we compile a list of good project ideas related to AI safety that people can work on? There are occasions at work when I have the opportunity to propose interesting project ideas for potential funding, and it would be really useful if there was somewhere I could look for projects that people here would really like someone to work on, even if they themselves don't have the time or resources to do so. I also keep meeting people who are searching for useful alignment-related projects they can work on for school, work, or as personal projects, and I think a list of project ideas might be helpful for them as well.

I'm particularly interested in project ideas that are currently not being worked on (to your knowledge) but where it would be great if someone would take up that project. Or alternatively, project ideas that are currently being worked on but where there are variations on those ideas that nobody has yet attempted but someone should.

Occasionally someone will post an idea or set of ideas on the Alignment Forum, for example Ajeya Cotra's "sandwiching" idea or the recent list of ideas from Stuart Armstrong and Owain Evans. I also sometimes come across ideas mentioned towards the end of a paper or buried somewhere in a research agenda. But I think having a larger list somewhere could be really useful.

(Note: I am not looking for lists of open problems, challenges, or very general research directions. I'm looking for suggestions that at least point towards a concrete project idea, and where an individual or small team might be able to produce useful results given current technology and with sufficient time and resources.)

Please post ideas or links / references to published ideas in the comments, if you know of any. Ideas mentioned as part of a larger post or paper would count, but please point to the section where the idea is mentioned.

If I get enough links or references maybe I'll try to compile a list that others can use.
Antifragility in Games of Chance, Research, and Debate
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-05-26T17:51:41.808Z

Nassim Taleb's concept of "antifragility" describes strategies in which a short-term cost, harm or failure enables a long-term gain. This might be because the short-term cost conveys information that allows you to improve future decision-making. Or maybe it provokes a useful stress response, as in the honeymoon period after a disaster, or a "warning shot" that helps alert the world to an existential risk.

Perhaps in the world of investments, the value of antifragility is already priced in. In other areas where we have less reason to presuppose civilizational adequacy, perhaps Taleb is right that antifragility is neglected. Perhaps we ignore, or fail to anticipate, the value of the information we'd gain from failure. Or we choose strategies that do not provide failure-value, when strategies that do promise failure-value exist.

Here are a few examples of antifragility.

Games of chance

In a bag are nine white marbles and one red marble. You draw up to five times, and if you draw the red marble, you win $10 and the game ends. There are two versions in this game. One is drawing with replacement - you have to put white marbles back after you draw them. The other is drawing without replacement - if you draw a white marble, you don't have to put it back in the bag. In the version without replacement, your chances improve with each draw.

Let's imagine that each draw costs you 50 cents. In the game with replacement, each draw has a cost of 50 cents, and a 10% chance of winning $10. The expected value of each draw, then, is 50 cents.

In the game without replacement (the antifragile game), the first draw comes with a 10% chance of winning $10, and has an expected value of 50 cents. Failing that, you have a 1/9 chance on the second draw (one less white marble), with an expected value of 1/9 x $10 - $0.50 = $0.61. The rest of the draws have expected values of $0.75, $0.93, and $1.17. It's clear that the antifragile game is superior.

In this game, it's not hard to see that the game without replacement is a better deal than the game with replacement. Perhaps it's harder to perceive such structural differences in real-world scenarios.

Experimental design

The Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty experiment showed that DNA is the molecule that transmits genetic information. They took a pathogenic Pneumococcus, isolated and purified its DNA, and transferred it to a nonpathogenic Pneumococcus. Th...
[Prediction] What war between the USA and China would look like in 2050
by lsusr — 2021-05-26T06:24:36.353Z

The Cold War is over. Russia is a fading power. The most important geopolitical rivalry of the 21st century is between China and the USA. Any analysis of the conflict must take into account the possibility that it escalates into a hot war. This post explores how a direct conflict between the USA and China might unfold. It assumes strong AI has not been invented and nuclear weapons are not used.

America's Interests

The United States' interests have been basically unchanged since 1945. Its primary objective is to maintain the liberal world order (LWO), also known as the "rules-based international order". The LWO describes a set of global, rule-based structured relationships based on economic liberalism as embodied by the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. The LWO promotes political liberalism too, albeit much less consistently.

As the primary power behind the LWO, the United States designed it to maximize economic and political power of the United States. As the United States' relative power wanes, we may see a transition toward a more multipolar LWO.

China's Interests

China's interests have been basically unchanged since 1978. Its primary objective is to maintain internal domestic stability i.e. prevent regime change. There are two ways of keeping its population under control: via a police state and via economic development. The stronger it's police state the less economic development is necessary and vice versa. China's economic growth is slowing as its east cost gets closer to a Western standard of living.

The People's Republic of China did not get a seat at the table in 1945 when the LWO was designed. It wasn't even allowed into the United Nations until 1971. From 1945 until 1971, "China" was represented by the Republic of China i.e. Taiwan. This illustrates how the LWO favors American geopolitical interests and is one of the many reasons why the People's Republic of China seeks to annex Taiwan.

China has prospered under the LWO. Rather than establishing broad international coalitions, China tends to pursue its interests bilaterally. With a few exceptions (like the dispute over the South China Sea) China is content to play according to the rules of the LWO.

Besides annexing Taiwan, China's geopolitical interests mostly revolve around securing markets and raw materials to fuel its economic development. This is the motivation behind 一带一路 (the Belt ...
The Practice & Virtue of Discernment
by ozziegooen — 2021-05-26T00:34:08.932Z

Epistemic status: I think this definition might be useful, but it might also be too abstract, inelegant, or obvious.

Scholarship status: This is based mostly on background knowledge and some work in decision making. It touches topics in data science, General Semantics, and a lot of LessWrong. I’m not an expert in any of these topics.

Many thanks to David Manheim, Nuño Sempere, and Marta Krzeminska for comments, edits, and suggestions for this post.

Key Points

You have an generalization. You split up this generalization and wind up with a structure that's easier to work with. This is called discernment.
I think discernment is very important, but often overlooked and underappreciated.
I suggest thinking of discernment through the lens of decision analysis. The expected value of information of working on a problem goes up once good discernment is done.
This post includes a long list of overgeneralizations and ways to apply discernment to them. Find the ones that best appeal to you.
We can split up the types of discernment into a bunch of distinct buckets. If you really care, there's some clarification around where exactly the distinctions lie between what is and isn't discernment.
Bad discernment is dangerous. Learn and practice safe discernment, avoiding harming yourself and others.
This might all seem obvious. It wasn't completely obvious to me, especially before I wrote it. If it's obvious to you, hopefully this post can still be useful for creating common knowledge. If you talk about discernment, you can point people to this post, which has possibly done more work than necessary to pin it down.
If you like the idea of rationality virtues, I suggest discernment as a virtue. If you don't, I suggest thinking of discernment as an affordance.

Motivation and Definition

Decision making and debate on overgeneral topics seems like an obvious failure mode, but they happen all the time. Take some of the topic titles from the

Oxford University Student Union Debates

:

Snowden is a Hero
The United States is Institutionally Racist
Islam is Not a Peaceful Religion
We Should NOT Have Confidence in Modi’s Government
Thatcher was not good for Britain
We should NOT reject traditional masculinity
Immigration is Bad for Britain

These questions seem intentionally crafted to cause intellectual chaos. Let’s take, “Thatcher was not good for Britain.” A better discussion could be something like, “Let’s br...
MDP models are determined by the agent architecture and the environmental dynamics
by TurnTrout — 2021-05-26T00:14:00.699Z

Seeking Power is Often Robustly Instrumental in MDPs relates the structure of the agent's environment (the 'Markov decision process (MDP) model') to the tendencies of optimal policies for different reward functions in that environment ('instrumental convergence'). The results tell us what optimal decision-making 'tends to look like' in a given environment structure, formalizing reasoning that says e.g. that most agents stay alive because that helps them achieve their goals.

The model for a deterministic MDP. When the agent cares a lot about future reward (the discount rate is near 1), most reward functions have optimal policies which go right.

Several people have claimed to me that these results need subjective modelling decisions. For example, ofer wrote:

I think using a well-chosen reward distribution is necessary, otherwise POWER depends on arbitrary choices in the design of the MDP's state graph. E.g. suppose the student [in a different example] writes about every action they take in a blog that no one reads, and we choose to include the content of the blog as part of the MDP state. This arbitrary choice effectively unrolls the state graph into a tree with a constant branching factor (+ self-loops in the terminal states) and we get that the POWER of all the states is equal.

In the above example, you could think about the environment as in the above image, or you could imagine that state '3' is actually a million different states which just happen to seem similar to us! If that were true, then optimal policies would tend to go down, since that would give the agent millions of choices about where it ends up. Therefore, the power-seeking theorems depend on subjective modelling assumptions.

I used to think this, but this is wrong. The MDP model is

determined

by the agent's implementation + the task's dynamics.

To make this point, let's back out to a more familiar MDP: Pac-Man.

Consider the MDP model associated with the Pac-Man video game. Ghosts kill the player - after the player loses their last life, suppose they enter a "game over" terminal state which shows the final configuration. This environment has Pac-Man's dynamics, but not its usual score function. Fixing the dynamics, what actions are optimal as we vary the reward function?

When the discount rate is near 1, most reward functions avoid immediately dying to the ghost, because then the...
The BTC equilibriumating and the ETH one-eightening
by Randomized, Controlled — 2021-05-25T21:32:20.604Z

Epistemic status: may or may not make you a bajillion dollars. Tots not investment advice.

These are my summary notes on John Pfeffer's An Investor's Take on Cryptoassets [December, 2017] and
and one "SquishChaos"'s [aka Nikhil Shamapant] Etherium, The Triple Halving [April, 2021].

You may know of the Squish report as the source of a spicy $150k price prediction for Eth. My friend mentioned that it was being well-received by people in the finance industry, so I decided to take a look. By my own (financial neophyte's) judgement it seems reasonably sophisticated, decently-reasoned and has compelling, time-sensitive predictions. I think reading Squish alongside Pfeffer is productive, as they have different foci and [potentially?] different conclusions. There may also be a conflict in their analysis of the impact of Proof of Stake on network value (and, ultimately, token value) which I'm curious to see folks unpack here.

Both are well-written, light on the jargon yet informationally dense, but not oppressively so. I was able to do a read-skim of both such that I got a Pareto 80/20 in a few hours. I'd highly recommend taking a look at both if you find these summary notes interesting -- my goal here is to provide a scaffold of their arguments, such that interested parties can have a conversation, rather than to reproduce them in detail.

I've inserted my own questions throughout this document -- I have more questions than opinions at this point.

An Equilibrium valuation model of crypto

Note: Unless otherwise noted, pull quotes in this section are from Pfeffer.

Pfeffer provides an equilibrium approach here, asking what the steady-state valuation of a crypto asset will be. He provides a simple mathematical model:

M=PQVelocity

where M is the money supply, PQ is the sum of the product of the Price and Quantity of resources consumed by the currency (ie, compute PQ + bandwidth PQ + storage PQ + watts PQ + dank memes PQ, dank meme-lords PQ, etc). If T is the number of tokens that have been issued, we have a sweet little model for valuing a token: Value=M/T.

Pfeffer is primarily analyzing Bitcoin and Etherium here and seems close to being a bitcoin maximalist. Writing in 2017 he's quite skeptical of Etherium as an investment vehicle. Proof of Stake [PoS] was already being discussed in 2017; he models the outcome as follows:

Because PoS is dramatically more computationally efficie

...