trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Book Review: Invisible China
by Yudhister Kumar — 2023-10-14T21:51:10.792Z
Link: https://ykumar.org/invisible-china/

This is a book review of Invisible China. The book covers the rural-urban divide in China and its implications for China's continued economic growth. I think it's worth the read.

Pretty good. Made me think, and Rozelle's unique perspective (economist who's spent 30+ years on the ground) adds an authentic flavor to the book.

He claims that the existential threat to China's potential future growth and success is a lack of human capital: specifically, that systemic factors hinder rural Chinese children's ability to participate effectively in the service-based, advanced economy of the 21st century, and that fixing this issue is imperative so that China does not fall into the middle income trap.

In a 2004 article in Foreign Affairs, political scientist Geoffrey Garrett shared a startling observation. He looked at the history of recent economic development and noticed that while rich countries were continuing to do well and many poor countries were achieving strong growth rates, the countries in the middle of the global income spectrum were growing more slowly and less successfully than anyone else.

In a report that made ripples throughout the development world, economists at the World Bank demonstrated the full extent of the problem. The report showed that out of 101 countries that were middle income in 1960, only thirteen had made it to high-income status by 2008. The rest remained stuck or even ended the fifty years poorer than before.

The middle income trap is the stagnation developing countries face when their average citizen reaches a "middle income." An easy way for developing countries to rapidly grow their economies is to accept industrialization and foreign direct investment, shifting to a manufacturing economy reminiscent of Western nations in the 1890s. However, Rozelle makes the argument that to then shift from a middle income to high income country requires an educated populace, and the middle-income countries which have failed to continue their economic growth did not appropriately invest in the education of their citizenry.

But with a bit of historical data, another trend emerges that is far more relevant to the question at hand: the very small number of countries that have made it out of middle-income status in recent decades—the graduates—all have very high levels of high school education. Even more surprising, they’ve had those high levels

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Book Review: Radical Markets
by Yudhister Kumar — 2023-10-14T21:41:48.126Z
Link: https://ykumar.org/radical-markets/

This is a book review of Radical Markets, taken from my blog Random Walks. I summarize and critique each chapter to varying extents. I give the book a rating of 2/5, and recommend reading the first two chapters.

Radical Markets? More like Activist Markets

The Atlas Fellowship partners with Impact Books to give fellows access to a curated collection of books worth reading. One of these books is Radical Markets. The first two chapters are worth reading, the rest are not.

Posner & Weyl make five proposals to "uproot capitalism and democracy for a just society":

partial common ownership of land, mediated by auctions,
quadratic voting,
individual visa sponsorship,
demonopolizing capital, but only 'within industries',
treating data as labor.

Each has its own chapter, and each chapter is meant to stand alone as a defense of its policy. Yet the latter three fall flat.

What Radical Markets does well: a coherent exposition of Georgism, ‘radical’ applications of auctions to the uninitiated, and the first decent defense of quadratic voting from first principles I’ve read. What it falls victim to: left-right political reductionism, one-size-fits-all solutions to coordination problems, and hefty claims partnered with weak evidence.

Links to each chapter review:

Property as Monopoly
Radical Democracy
Uniting the World's Workers
Dismembering the Octopus
Data as Labor

Property as Monopoly

The first chapter is the best chapter. It popularizes the Common Ownership Self-assessed Tax (COST) (aka the Harberger Tax) as a plausible mechanism by which an auction-based property market could be implemented. Coupled with concrete policy proposals and effect analyses, it is a self-contained introduction to modern-day Georgism and disrupting the current 'property monopoly' status quo.

What is a COST? In Harberger's own words:

If taxes are to be levied...on...the value of ... properties ... it is important that assessment procedures be adopted which estimate the true economic value ... The economist's answer... is simple and essentially fool-proof: allow each...owner.. to declare the value of his own property, make the declared values ... public, and require that an owner sell his property to any bidder... willing to pay... the declared value. This system is simple, self-enforcing, allows no scope for corruption, has negligible cost of administration, and creates incentives, in addition to those already

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One-on-one tutoring for any subject
by  — 2023-10-14T20:58:44.603Z

I occasionally find myself wanting to directly contact someone with expert understanding of something - some software, some topic - to ask a few specific questions and have a brief discussion about an idea, a workflow, etc. Naturally, I'd be happy to pay for such a service.

Stack Overflow is all well and good, but I am looking to have a longer discussion / more precise and detailed feedback about something specific that I'm working on. Most recently I've wanted to talk to an expert in Adobe InDesign to check that some process I have set up is the right way to go about things. In the past I've wanted to get advice and feedback on the overall architecture of a small project's code base.

I haven't been able to find a generic "contact an expert" website or serve out there. Has anyone else?
The Puritans would one-box: evidential decision theory in the 17th century
by Jacob G-W — 2023-10-14T20:23:24.346Z
Link: https://jacobgw.com/blog/philosophy/2023/10/14/puritan.html

Evidential decision theory was used way earlier than I would have expected, and its development was motivated theologically.

Unconditional election is the Protestant (mainly Calvinist and Puritan) idea that God made the decisions of who would go to heaven and hell before He created the world (very similar to predestination).
It is "unconditional" because nothing you do in your life can change the outcome of whether you go to heaven or hell.

If you believe in this unconditional election, then you face a dilemma: "if election is unconditional and grace is irresistible, then why not sit back and wait for the inevitable?" (Stearns and Brawner, “New England Church ‘Relations’ and Continuity in Early Congregational History”, 30). If this is the case, where did the term "Puritan work ethic" come from? Why were the Sepratists so religious? According to Stearns and Brawner, prayer was used to find out if you were "elected":

The simplest and perhaps most satisfying method of dealing with this question was that of examining closely personal experience for signs of election. If an anxious Christian could find assurance that the seeds of regeneration had been planted in him, he could then be urged to labor with the Holy Ghost to bring forth the fruits of sanctification and thus participate actively in the work of his own redemption. But the spiritual physicians could not administer real comfort unless they could demonstrate convincingly that the symptoms of true faith and repentance were distinguishable from the simulacra produced by hope and fear. To this end they labored diligently. In 1592, William Perkins published a work entitled, A Case of Conscience, the greatest that ever was: How a Man may know whether he be a Child of God or No. The years that followed witnessed a great volume of sermons and treatises addressed in whole or in part to the same question. This literature may properly be called scientific, in the modern sense of the word, because it proceeded from the premise that the human will is a passive agent of the Holy Ghost—just as in modern psychology, the will is a passive agent of equally mysterious pneuma, labelled id, libido, etc. Puritan casuistry, in other words, was a branch of the science of pneumatology. It was not primarily concerned to chasten hypocrites (for hypocrites and true believers alike were caught up in the same inexorable determinism),

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Natural Abstraction: Convergent Preferences Over Information Structures
by paulom — 2023-10-14T18:34:41.559Z

The natural abstraction hypothesis claims (in part) that a wide variety of agents will learn to use the same abstractions and concepts to reason about the world.

What's the simplest possible setting where we can state something like this formally? Under what conditions is it true?

One necessary condition to say that agents use 'the same abstractions' is that their decisions depend on the same coarse-grained information about the environment. Motivated by this, we consider a setting where an agent needs to decide which information to pass though an information bottleneck, and ask: when do different utility functions prefer to preserve the same information?

As we develop this setting, we:

unify and extend the Blackwell Informativeness and Good(er) Regulator theorems

investigate the minimum structure needed for strong natural abstractions (in this sense) to exist

give examples where strong natural abstractions a) exist b) don't exist c) exist at some levels of capability, but not at others - including cases where the natural abstractions at different sizes are orthogonal

demonstrate that (very) weak natural abstractions exist under weak conditions

formally connect natural abstractions to instrumental power-seeking incentives, and characterize them in a way inspired by Turner's power-seeking theorems.

(As far as I can tell, apart from the obvious cited Theorems, these results are original[1])

Whereas Wentworth's abstraction work has focused on what natural abstractions might look like, and why we might expect them to exist, this work focuses on exploring what it would mean for something to be a natural abstraction in the first place. Rather than an attempt to answer the natural abstraction hypothesis, it is more an attempt to understand the question.

1. Base setting

Any agent exists within an environment that is bigger than itself. It therefore necessarily maps a large number of potential environment states to a smaller number of internal states. When it then chooses what action to take, this choice depends only on its internal state.

Roughly, we can consider this mapping from the environment to action-influencing internal states to be the agent's abstractions[2]. We want to understand when different utility functions will share preferences about how to do this mapping - under the natural abstraction hypothesis, in appropriate conditions, there should be certain ab...
ChatGPT tells 20 versions of its prototypical story, with a short note on method
by Bill Benzon — 2023-10-14T15:27:58.408Z

Cross-posted from New Savanna.

New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/108129357/ChatGPT_tells_20_versions_of_its_prototypical_story_with_a_short_note_on_method
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4602347
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374723644_ChatGPT_tells_20_versions_of_its_prototypical_story_with_a_short_note_on_method

Abstract: ChatGPT responds the prompt, "story", with a simple story. 10 stories elicited by that prompt in a single session have a greater variety of protagonists than 10 stories each elicited in its own session. Prototype: 19 stories were about protagonists who venture into the world and learn things that benefit their community. ChatGPT's response to that simple prompt gives us a clue about the structure of the underlying model.

Introduction: ChatGPT’s prototypical story is about exploration

I have been systematically investigating ChatGPT’s story-telling behavior since early January of this year (2023).[1] I issued a working paper early in March where I began teasing out some regularities in this behavior.[2] One might say I was looking for ChatGPT’s story grammar, but that terminology has the wrong connotations since it has its origins in work on symbolic computing going back to the 1970s. I’m pretty sure that’s not how ChatGPT generates stories. Just what it is doing, that’s not so clear. At the moment I’m inclined to think that it’s more like an epigenetic landscape:

That discussion, however, is well beyond the scope of this introduction.

Twenty stories

This introduction is about the 20 stories I had ChatGPT generate this morning (10.13.23). Each story was generated by a single word: story. I generated the first ten stories in one single session while I used individual sessions for each of the last ten stories. Why did I make that distinction? Knowing that ChatGPT takes the entire session to date into account when it responds to a prompt, I assumed that generating many stories in a single session would have some effect of the stories. I conjectured that there would be greater variety among the 10 stories generated in the single session than among the 10 stories where each was generated in its own session.

A quick look at the protagonists in the 20 stories suggests that this is true. Two out of the first 10 stories have a protagonist named “Elara,” while...
Will no one rid me of this turbulent pest?
by Metacelsus — 2023-10-14T15:27:21.497Z
Link: https://denovo.substack.com/p/will-no-one-rid-me-of-this-turbulent

Last year, I wrote about the promise of gene drives to wipe out mosquito species and end malaria.
In the time since my previous writing, gene drives have still not been used in the wild, and over 600,000 people have died of malaria. Although there are promising new developments such as malaria vaccines, there have also been some pretty bad setbacks (such as mosquitoes and parasites developing resistance to commonly used chemicals), and malaria deaths have increased slightly from a few years ago. Recent news coverage[1] has highlighted that the fight against malaria has stalled, and even reversed in some areas. Clearly, scientists and public health workers are trying hard with the tools they have, but this effort is not enough.

Gene drives have the potential to end malaria. However, this potential will remain unrealized unless they are deployed – and every day we wait, more than 1,600 people (mostly African children) die. But who should deploy them?

I’m well aware of the Unilateralist’s Curse, and before publishing this post, I asked, why haven’t existing groups already released gene drive mosquitoes? Academic labs, and the nonprofit organization Target Malaria, have been working on gene drives for several years already, but they have been taking a cautious, incremental approach.[2] There are several good reasons for this:

Unilateral release of a gene drive is likely to cause public backlash, because genetic engineering is widely perceived as scary. This is especially true if the organization releasing the gene drive does not have support from the local government.
The first version of any gene drive released into the wild is unlikely to cause complete eradication because mosquitoes may become resistant (either through natural or nuclease-induced mutations).[3] Therefore, updated gene drive versions will likely be required to overcome resistance. The number of potential gene drive target sites in the mosquito genome is big enough that I don’t think this will stop eradication, unless gene drives are banned after the first release due to public backlash.
As a corollary, a temporary drop in malaria due to a partially effective gene drive, followed by resurgence due to resistance, could lead to even more deaths because humans would lose protective antibodies against malaria over time.
Gene drives also have the opportunity to eradicate other pathogens such

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Which Anaesthetic To Choose?
by dadadarren — 2023-10-14T14:55:42.572Z

In causal decision theory, the perspective/indexical aspect could lead to reflective inconsistency. This is generally regarded as a problem. Here I present a thought experiment to show why this view may require further review.

Two Anaesthetics

Suppose you are about to undergo a major operation. You can choose one of the following two anesthetics:

Drug A functions as follows:

It paralyzes your body and relaxes your muscles
It prevents long-term memory from forming for the duration of the operation

Drug B functions as follows:

It paralyzes your body and relaxes your muscles (same as A)
It renders you unconscious for the duration of the operation

Suppose the two drugs are equal in all other considerations such as safety, long-term side effects, etc. But Drug A is covered by your health insurance while Drug B requires you to pay 1 dollar out-of-pocket. What would you pick?

Reflective Inconsistency

Drug A would lead to the dreaded anesthesia awareness, that you will feel the excruciating pain and trauma of being operated on. To prevent it from happening, for the mere cost of 1 dollar, Drug B is the obvious choice.

Yet for moments after the operation, you would be wishing that you had chosen Drug A instead. The choice of drugs does not lead to any long-term difference, other than the fact that you would be 1 dollar richer if you had gone with Drug A. Furthermore, you know this before the operation.

If the later you dictate your current decision it would mean Drug A is the clear winner. (Consider this as a case of post-commitment, in contrast to pre-commitments where an earlier self takes away the decision at a later point, often appearing in decision-making problems such as Parfit's Hitchhiker) Hence the inconsistency.

Decision Theories

CDT has a naturally built-in indexical element. Considering the fact that the decision is based on a pre-operation perspective, it will choose Drug B over A.

However, for non-indexical decision theories, such as UDT or EDT, the approach would be less clear, and it could very well lead to choosing Drug A. Should it only consider the utility at the end of the experiment? Or should it get around the indexicals with some self-sampling assumptions like common camps in anthropics? Neither approach seems problem-free.
Is the Wave non-disparagement thingy okay?
by Ruby — 2023-10-14T05:31:21.640Z

A few weeks ago, Linch, Auckland (pseudonym), and I (Ruby) decided to chat about something and settled on this topic. What follows is a mix of distillation and edited chat (Slack) transcript.

Auckland and I (Ruby) start from the position that the Wave non-disparagement agreement is probably bad. Linch expresses uncertainty about whether, if broader society (or at least your local reference class) makes use of non-disparagement agreements, that makes it okay to use them yourself.

We discuss various possible examples of not-good behavior (non-consent, lying, bribing, saying “awesome” when you mean “mildly positive”) that people empirically engage in and/or seem more okay if everyone is doing them. We think about what “reference class” Wave is in, e.g. more general Silicon Valley vs EA.

A big is crux is whether Wave had been prompted to reflect on their non-disparagement agreement, and if so, their reaction. It might be that non-disparagements are bad, but you have to be paying attention to notice when you should be morally better than your surrounding society. Some employees wanting to negotiate out of the non-disparagement agreement seems like it was a prompt to reflect on it. Also how much the founders of Wave say “oops” when it’s pointed it out, vs defending the practice.

Beyond that, there’s a question of even if someone is not particularly blameworthy for engaging in a standard widespread not-good behavior, do you still want them in a leadership position? E.g. board of Effective Ventures/CEA? As opposed to wanting leaders who’d have the discernment to catch this kind of thing and not do it. We have some more discussion about who you want for EA leadership related to how good you think EA is.

Linch raises that non-disparagement agreements are in fact not legally enforceable. We all agree that it’s plausible EAs should push Wave to make an official declaration to void their non-disparagement agreements.

Background Context

In the discussion of

Nonlinear's behavior

, the topic of NDAs/other agreements that restrict employees speaking negatively of former employer's came up.

jefftk

(permalink)

:

an NDA to prevent people from publicly criticizing their former workplace seems line-crossing to me.

I don't like these, but they are (were) depressingly common. I know at least one org that's generally well regarded by EAs that used them.

habryka

(permalink)

:

Oh, wow, pl

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The Gods of Straight Lines
by Richard_Ngo — 2023-10-14T04:10:50.020Z
Link: https://www.narrativeark.xyz/p/the-gods-of-straight-lines

“He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” - Adam Smith

Cassandra was a priestess who was granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo. But after she rejected his advances, he changed it to a curse: although she would still be able to foresee the future, nobody would ever believe her.

Poor Cassandra, you think. And yet we are not so different from her. We have our own gods:

the gods of straight lines

. And they too grant us a gift and a curse: to know that we’re building the future according to plan—but to know that the plan is theirs, not ours.

I picture the gods of straight lines as innumerable hovering spirits, just in the corner of your vision, vanishing as you turn to look at them directly. It’s hard to tell if they’re still or in motion. But they’re always there, as the world glides forward on its trajectory. And when that trajectory shifts, or something disruptive happens, they slide in, and they gently push it back on track. They take joy in the work, I think. Or amusement, at least, at all the narratives that humans develop to explain why each thing happened. It’s not that those narratives are false—but they almost always miss the point.

A newspaper pushes out a vitriolic op-ed, shaking up a nation’s politics? But if it will get clicks, then another newspaper would have run it later anyway. A metropolis builds more housing to fill its desperate need? Then the opposition from homeowners just becomes stronger, and the city relaxes into the same stranglehold as

almost every other

. A philosopher finds a new way of viewing the world? But if it captures the spirit of the age, then someone else would have written it better in a year or ten; and if it doesn’t, then it will never gain traction anyway. A country delays industrialization for decades? Then when it starts it will simply

catch up much faster

, skipping all the burdensome prerequisites:

straight from telegraphs to cell phones

, no costly telephone wires in sight.

A global war, a global pandemic? They’re horrifically destructive and wasteful—but also invigorating and regenerative, disrupting the calcified old power structures. And the two effects cancel out. You can tell, because

the lines remain straight

: a few short years after the bombs stopped falling in 1945, the world economy returned to trend as ...