trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
A conversation on theory of mind, subjectivity, and objectivity
by jessicata — 2020-03-10T04:59:23.266Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2020/03/10/a-conversation-on-theory-of-mind-subjectivity-and-objectivity/

I recently had a Twitter conversation with Roko Mijic. I believe it contains ideas that a wider philosophical/rationalist audience may find valuable, and so include here a transcript (quoted with permission).

Jessica: There are a number of "runs on top of" relations in physicalism:

mind runs on top of body

discrete runs on top of continuous

choice runs on top of causality

My present philosophy inverts the metaphysical order: mind/discrete/choice is more basic.

This is less of a problem than it first appears, because mind/discrete/choice can conceptualize, hypothesize, and learn about body/continuous/causality, and believe in a "effectively runs on" relation between the two.

In contrast, starting from body/continuous/causality has trouble with getting to mind/discrete/choice as even being conceptualizable, hence tending towards eliminativism.

Roko: Eliminitivism has a good track record though.

Jessica: Nah, it can't account for what an "observation" is so can't really explain observations.

Roko: I don't really see a problem here. It makes perfect sense within a reductionist or eliminativist paradigm for a robot to have some sensors and to sense its environment. You don't need a soul, or god, or strong free will, or objective person-independent values for that.

Jessica: Subjective Occam's razor (incl. Solomonoff induction) says I should adopt the explanation that best explains my observations. Eliminativism can't really say what "my" means here. If it believed in "my observations" it would believe in consciousness.

It has to do some ontological reshuffling around what "observations" are that, I think, undermines the case for believing in physics in the first place, which is that it explains my observations.

Roko: It means the observations that are caused by sensors plugged into the hardware that your algorithm instance is running on.

Jessica: That means "my algorithm instance" exists. Sounds like a mental entity. Can't really have those under eliminativism (but can under functionalism etc).

Roko: I don't want to eliminate my mental instance from my philosophy, that would be kind of ridiculous.

Jessica: Well, yes, so eliminativism is false. I understand eliminativism to mean there is only physical, no mental. Believing mental runs on physical could be functionalism, property dualism, or some other non-eliminativist position.

Roko: I think it makes more sense to think of

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Growth rate of COVID-19 outbreaks
by Bucky — 2020-03-09T23:16:51.275Z

Edit 14/03/2020: The top two graphs are now available as interactive versions here (thanks to Ruby for helping with getting this uploaded). The labels on the right are clickable to remove or add countries (double click selects only that country or all countries). The buttons at the top change the y-axis (annoyingly the y-axis range buttons auto-set to a linear scale) and the slider at the bottom zooms the x-axis.

Note that the doubling times are actually lower than in the post below due to an error in my original spreadsheet. I've also added the last few days worth of data to the graphs.

COVID-19 has now broken out in a number of countries. This enables us to compare spread rates across to get a better idea of what to expect.

Below is a graph of cumulative cases in each country. In an attempt to normalise the x-axis, I have plotted from the day that the total number of cases in the country passed 40 (40 was just because the earliest China data that I had started at 42).

The most obvious thing is that most countries follow a fairly consistent pattern of growth in the first week and a bit.

The outliers are Singapore, Japan and Australia (plus Hong Kong, not shown). These countries have lots of cases yet have not seen a corresponding fast exponential growth in cases. I'm not sure why these particular countries have bucked the trend or whether there is something odd about their reporting (I looked for this but didn't find anything).

I haven't considered how many cases are recovered as it was hard to get reliable results and for most locations recovered cases are minimal. Something weird is happening with the number of recoveries in Iran which has over 2,000, despite only passing that number of cases within the last 6 days.

Doubling time

We can convert the above graph into doubling time:

I've removed the outlier countries for clarity. The doubling time is fairly consistently 2-3 days. It seems to increase slightly over time.

China growth rate

I wrote a post previously about analysing the growth rate of COVID-19 in China.

If we look at the graph above, the Chinese rate is roughly constant over the first 11 days, after which the growth rate decreases.

So the first 11 days would fit nicely to an exponential growth model, but what changed? On day 7 (23rd Feb) the quarantine was started. A decrease in growth rate starting a few days later makes sense based...
Name of Problem?
by johnswentworth — 2020-03-09T20:15:11.760Z

If we expand out an arbitrary program, we get a (usually infinite) expression tree. For instance, we can expand

fact(n) := (n == 0) ? 1 : n*fact(n-1)

into

fact(n) = (n == 0) ? 1 : n*(((n-1) == 0) ? 1 : (n-1) * ( (((n-1)-1) == 0) ? ... ))))

Let's call two programs "expression-equivalent" if they expand into the same expression tree (allowing for renaming of input variables). Two interesting problems:

Write an efficient algorithm to decide expression-equivalence of two given programs.
Write a program M which decides whether a given program is expression-equivalent to M itself.

I'm pretty sure these are both tractable, as well as some relaxations of them (e.g. allowing for more kinds of differences between the expressions).

Does anybody know of an existing name for "expression-equivalence", an existing algorithm for solving either of the above problems, or any relevant literature?
What is the typical course of COVID-19? What are the variants?
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-09T17:52:25.356Z

I've heard a lot about the death rate, hospitalization rate, doubling time, etc, but I don't feel like I know *what happens* when you catch SARS-CoV-2. My questions include, but are not limited to:

How long from infection to symptoms?
How do symptoms progress?
What percent of people never get symptoms?
When do you start being contagious?
When do you stop?

I will edit this top-level post with answers as they are filled it.
How effective are tulpas?
by  — 2020-03-09T17:35:39.634Z

Edit: After further consideration, I've concluded that the risk:reward ratio for tulpamancy isn't worth it and won't be pursuing the topic further. I may revisit this conclusion if I encounter new information, but otherwise I'm content to pursue improvements in a more "standard" fashion. Thank you to everyone who posted in the comments.

If you don't know what a tulpa is, here's a quick description taken from r/tulpas:

A tulpa is a mental companion created by focused thought and recurrent interaction, similar to an imaginary friend. However, unlike them, tulpas possess their own will, thoughts and emotions, allowing them to act independently.

I'm not particularly concerned whether tulpas are "real" in the sense of being another person. Free will isn't real, but it's still useful to behave as if it is.

No, what I'm interested in is how effective they are. A second rationalist in my head sounds pretty great. Together we would be unstoppable. Metaphorically. My ambitions are much less grand than that makes them sound.

But I have some concerns.

Since a tulpa doesn't get its own hardware, it seems likely that hosting one would degrade my original performance. Everyone says this doesn't happen, but I think it'd be very difficult to detect this, especially for someone who isn't already trained in rationality. Especially if the degradation occurred over a period of months (which is how long it usually takes to instantiate a tulpa).

A lot of what I've read online is contradictory. Some people say tulpas can learn other skills and be better at them. Others say they've never lost an argument with their tulpa. Tulpas can be evil. Tulpas are slavish pawns. Tulpas can take over your body, tulpas never take over bodies. Tulpas can do homework. Tulpas can't do math.

Then there's the obvious falsehoods. Tulpas are demons/spirits/angels (pick your flavor of religion). They're telepathic, telekinetic, and have flawless memories. They can see things behind you. There's not as much of this as I expected; most of the claims are at least plausible. Some guides are cloaked in mystic imagery (runes, circles, symbols), but even they usually admit that the occult stuff isn't really necessary.

It does seem like there are clear failure modes. Don't make a Quirrel tul...
[Article review] Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment
by MichaelA — 2020-03-09T12:42:08.987Z

In January, DeepMind released a paper by Iason Gabriel called Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment (author’s summary here; Rohin Shah's summary here). Here’s the abstract:

This paper looks at philosophical questions that arise in the context of AI alignment. It defends three propositions. First, normative and technical aspects of the AI alignment problem are interrelated, creating space for productive engagement between people working in both domains. Second, it is important to be clear about the goal of alignment. There are significant differences between AI that aligns with instructions, intentions, revealed preferences, ideal preferences, interests and values. A principle-based approach to AI alignment, which combines these elements in a systematic way, has considerable advantages in this context. Third, the central challenge for theorists is not to identify ‘true’ moral principles for AI; rather, it is to identify fair principles for alignment, that receive reflective endorsement despite widespread variation in people’s moral beliefs. The final part of the paper explores three ways in which fair principles for AI alignment could potentially be identified.

I found this an interesting paper, and overall I think that I agreed with a lot of it, and that I’d recommend it to people interested in the topic. My main hesitation would be that people who already know a lot about these topics might find most of what the paper says familiar. But I’d guess that even such people would probably still learn something, and that they might benefit from how the paper packages and explains the things they were already familiar with.

It also felt promising to see a paper released by one of the leading AI labs close with:

Finally, the paper has treated AI as an emerging technology. However, the development of different forms of AI is not inevitable. Technologists therefore face important choices about what they want to build and why. Given the potential for AI to profoundly affect our world, these too are salient questions for our time.

But there were a few things in the paper that I felt a bit unsure about, and two passages in particular that I want to quibble with. I’ll first quote the whole first passage and give my high-level views on it, for context, and then I'll get into specifics on that passage. I'll then quote and critique the second passage. (Note that

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The Heckler's Veto Is Also Subject to the Unilateralist's Curse
by Zack_M_Davis — 2020-03-09T08:11:58.886Z

I occasionally see the "unilateralist's curse" invoked as a rationale for censorship in contexts where I am very suspicious that the actual reason is protecting some interest group's power. But if I'm alone in such suspicions, then maybe that means I'm just uniquely paranoid. To help sort out what's what, I consulted the paper by Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, and Tom Douglas in which the term was coined.

The main argument (as the authors note under the keyword "winner's curse") is basically an application of regression to the mean: if N agents are deciding whether to do something on the basis of its true value V plus random error term E, then someone with a large positive E might end up doing the thing even if V is actually negative—and the problem gets worse for larger N.

Crucially, Bostrom et al. note:

[T]hough we have thus far focused on cases where a number of agents can undertake an initiative and it matters only whether at least one of them does so, a similar problem arises when any one of a group of agents can spoil an initiative—for instance, where universal action is required to bring about an intended outcome. [...] Thus, in what follows, we assume that the unilateralist's curse can arise when each member of a group can unilaterally undertake or spoil an initiative (though for ease of exposition we sometimes mention only the former case).

The veto held by members of the United Nations Security Council is given as an illustrative example of unilateral spoiling. This re-framing of the underlying statistical insight (the unilateral veto being "dual" to the unilateral act) seems relevant to its application to censorship: an author deciding to publish a blog post (even if other forum members think it's harmful) is in the position of taking unilateralist action—but so is a member of a board of pre-readers of whom any one has the power to censor the post (even if the other reviewers think it's fine).

It occurs to me that a karma system (such as that used on this website) has the potential to be an adequate check against the unilateralist's curse as described by Bostrom et al. if we assume that the penalty applied to downvoted posts is sufficient to prevent the harm of the putative infohazard. If some possible post is infohazardous (say, doxxing someone's home address), most users will correctly know not to post it. If one user erroneously decides that dox

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Thoughts on the Scope of LessWrong's Infohazard Policies
by Ben Pace — 2020-03-09T07:44:57.949Z

Recently, I was asked about my opinion on deleting posts that had potentially bad consequences. In particular, whether I should delete a post criticising the CDC's response to the coronavirus, during a time of crisis where the CDC was the relevant US government authority on how to respond. I spent a few hours writing a response, and I've reproduced it here with light editing so it can be linked to and discussed out of the context of the thread. It's not tightly edited, but it has a bunch of things about the current policies that I think are helpful to say rather than not say.

This post doesn't discuss all aspects of how to deal with infohazards and secrecy on LessWrong. In areas such as AI capabilities, bioweapons, and more, the LessWrong engineering team has thought more about features to build to allow for multi-stage publication practises. But this was an instance of a user asking that a specific post be deleted because it posed an infohazard, so that's what I address below.

I've spent multiple hundreds of hours thinking about information hazards, publication norms, and how to avoid unilateralist action, and I regularly use those principles explicitly in decision-making. I've spent quite some time thinking about how to re-design LessWrong to allow for private discussion and vetting for issues that might lead to e.g. sharing insights that lead to advances in AI capabilities. But given all of that, on reflection, I completely disagree that this post should be deleted, or that the authors were taking worrying unilateralist action.

Let me give my thoughts on the issue of infohazards.

I am honestly not sure what work you think the term is doing in this situation, so I'll recap what it is for everyone following. In history, there has been a notion that all science is fundamentally good, that all knowledge is good, and that science need not ask ethical questions of its exploration. Much of Bostrom's career has been to draw the boundaries of this idea and show where it is false. For example, one can build technologies that a civilization is not wise enough to use correctly, that lead to degradation of society and even extinction (you and I are both building our lives around increasing the wisdom of society so that we don't go extinct). Bostrom's infohazards paper is a philosophical exercise, asking at every level of organisation what kinds of information can hurt you

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Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon
by Slimepriestess — 2020-03-09T07:28:32.865Z
Link: https://hivewired.wordpress.com/2020/03/09/sleepwalking-toward-armageddon/

The beginning of my Extinction series. The Death, Truth, and Extinction series will when completed become the core to what I'm calling The Eschatologist's Handbook. I'm skipping around a bit and writing all three series at the same time as I go through the materials so that I make sure I write them well.
Potential High-Leverage and Inexpensive Mitigations (which are still feasible) for Pandemics
by Davidmanheim — 2020-03-09T06:59:19.610Z

(Crossposted from EA Forum) A little over a year ago, I started a collaboration with David Denkenberger essentially trying to answer the question of what can we do to prepare for pandemics, focusing on things that are Important, Tractable, and Neglected. The resulting paper, entitled "Review of Potential High-Leverage and Inexpensive Mitigations for Reducing Risk in Epidemics and Pandemics" has now been accepted for publication. The publication process is unfortunately very slow*, but in addition to talking about a number of the things we should have been doing before COVID-19 hit**, there are a few that we are perhaps not too late to address.I thought it was worth considering a few of the still-relevant needs and activities that seem like potentially high-leverage avenues for investigation. Given that a few of the things seem still neglected, but are potentially addressable for the current pandemic are, I wanted to highlight them.

1) Enable people to stay isolated effectively.

People are currently being told to stay in quarantine if they were exposed. Unfortunately, staying home may become more difficult if people in isolation need supplies and have no income to allow them to purchase things, or if they cannot get certain things - many medicines must be picked up in person, and in some places, supplies cannot be easily ordered online. Furthermore, if delivery services are interrupted, (which is likely given the heightened risk of exposure for delivery workers, see below,) this will become more difficult. Contingency plans to help deal with the challenges would be helpful, and systems to enable volunteers to assist could also be a useful avenue of research.

2) Triage and manage medical care remotely.

Much medical care does not require hospitals or emergency rooms, but they are utilized anyways - that's where the doctors are. If medical facilities become overwhelmed, many of these need to be replaced by alternatives - self-administered diagnostics, systems to enable phlebotomy and similar testing without needing to go to hospitals, and similar. EMTs may need to be trained to do pre-hospital triage rather than bring lightly injured patients, or people at high risk of serious infection, to hospitals. Similarly, to the extent that people can self-treat, videos and instructions for doing so may be valuable.

3) Manage critical services through disruptio

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What can we do to help others during the coronavirus outbreak?
by swimchord — 2020-03-09T06:12:42.178Z

I'm sure a lot of people are wishing that they could do something to help with the coronavirus outbreak, and if things start to get really bad, that feeling will increase. It may be the case that there is really not much to do, and the best thing to do is just stay home, but it seems worth discussing, in case that there are better options.
I'll start with the obvious ones:
You can protect others by not spreading the virus: i.e. taking reasonable precautions to avoid being infected yourself, and isolating yourself to prevent spreading the virus.
Encouraging others (family, friends, co-workers) to likewise take reasonable precautions and isolate themselves to slow the spread of the disease. If you are a leader in a company or organization, use your influence to discourage in-person contact.
Some other ideas which I am not sure about:
Donating money. Who would you donate money to? Response is being led by governments, who don't need or take donations. In the US, a lot of hospitals are non-profits which can accept donations, but at the moment I don't have any reason to think donating would help their response to the crisis. Any useful ways to donate money?
Donating supplies. I guess most people probably don't have relevant supplies to donate. But I saw some talk on Twitter about Californians who bought respirators due to the fires last year, and if there was any way they could give them to those who might need them more (hospitals?). Does this make sense? Anything else like this?
Donating blood. This has nothing to do with the coronavirus, but it seems likely that if people are discouraged from leaving home, fewer people will donate blood, and meanwhile people will still have non-virus medical issues that will require blood transfusions. Does this make sense?
Volunteering. I'm sure a lot of people will want to do this since it gives a strong feeling of "helping out". It might make sense to split this question in two parts. First, in regions where there is not yet evidence of spread of the disease, are there beneficial volunteer opportunities to inform people/increase preparedness/otherwise prevent infection? Second, are there beneficial volunteer opportunities in regions where the disease is already spreading? The second one is probably more likely to be answered in the negative, since any additional activity might exacerbate the ...
Why hasn't the technology of Knowledge Representation (i.e., semantic networks, concept graphs, ontology engineering) been applied to create tools to help human thinkers?
by Polytopos — 2020-03-09T06:11:13.632Z

I've been studying the field of knowledge representation (KR) and everything I've come across is focused on building knowledge systems for machine processing. I wonder why nobody seems to have applied these ideas to make digital KR systems for human beings to use as tool for active inquiry or personal knowledge management. Reading this stuff, I get the sense that it mostly about encoding a lot of boring facts rather than helping us with the edge of discovery.

Two off-the-cuff hypotheses:

1. Lack of economic incentives to develop high-quality general user facing software for KR. These tools are too hard to use effectively in their current state to have any kind of widespread adoption outside of profit-driven business interests.

2. Inability of existing KR systems to ergonomically conform to human patterns of learning and reasoning. If so, this might be due to a lack of sufficient understanding how to transition between informal natural language based reasoning and formalized reasoning, or it may simply be that the chosen formalisms are not the best ones for empowering human thought.

On the other hand, I might be dead wrong. Maybe there has been some brilliant use of this stuff for human discovery that I am unaware of. If so, I would love to know about it.