trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The GameStop Situation: Simplified

by Annapurna — 2021-01-29T17:55:04.985Z

An attempt to explain what happened this week in plain english

Original post here.

By now, you have probably

seen

the

news

about

GameStop and its stock. I have found most articles and posts on the subject to have either an intermediate level of investment technicality or are simply too long. I am going to try to simplify the situation as best as possible. I will not define terms like ‘stock’ or ‘brokerage’, as it will increase the length of the post. Google any term you don’t know or message me and I will explain further.

When you trade a stock in the market, you can primarily do four things:

Buy the stock
Sell the stock (if you already own it)
Short sell the stock. This means having the investment firm where you hold your account lend you the stock and you sell it. You eventually will have to buy it back and give back to the investment firm. You make money by selling it high and buying it low later.
Buy to cover the stock. This is the process of buying back the stock you borrowed and giving it back to the firm that lent it to you.

GameStop (GME) is a company that sells video games and consoles in retail locations across North America. The rise in online shopping and ability to buy games and download them directly on the consoles has been very bad for the company over the last few years. The stock price has slowly gone down from ~$55 in 2013 all the way to ~$2.60 in March 2020. From May to August 2020, the stock price ranged from $4 to $6.

The pandemic disproportionately affected GameStop, since most of its locations were closed during the first lock downs. Several hedge funds, which are investment firms that invest institutional investors money in different types of strategies, decided that the company was going to to bankrupt and decided to short sell the stock.

This is the part where things get a little strange. GameStop has about 65 million shares outstanding of which about 47 million are available to trade at any given time. However at it’s peak about 71 million shares of GameStop were shorted. How is that possible? Let me explain with a little exercise:

Jorge has an account with XYZ Inc. Jorge decides to short GME stock, so XYZ Inc. lends him 1 share of GME and Jorge sells it to Sally.
Sally, who also has an account with XYZ Inc., buys the 1 GME share from Jorge.
Jorge wants to sell short another share of GME . XYZ Inc. lends Jorge Sally’s 1 share. Jorge sells the

...
What are some real life Inadequate Equilibria?
by Eli Tyre — 2021-01-29T12:17:15.496Z

I would like to compile an as-comprehensive-as-possible list of known Inadequate Equilibria / large scale coordination problems.

An Inadequate Equilibrium is a situation in which a community, an institution, or society at large is in a bad Nash equilibrium. The group as a whole has some sub-optimal set of norms and it would be better off with a different set of norms, but there's no individual actor who has both the power and the incentive to change the norms for the group. So the bad equilibrium persists.

Eliezer offers the following more specific criteria:

Cases where the decision lies in the hands of people who would gain little personally, or lose out personally, if they did what was necessary to help someone else;
Cases where decision-makers can’t reliably learn the information they need to make decisions, even though someone else has that information; and
Systems that are broken in multiple places so that no one actor can make them better, even though, in principle, some magically coordinated action could move to a new stable state.

I want to generate as many real-life examples of this phenomenon as possible. Help me generate some?

The goal here is quantity. Originality is not required.
As an additional incentive, I'll award $100 to the user who generates the most examples. (In order to count, each example has to have enough detail, or link to a detailed enough explanation, that I can understand how it is an inadequate equilibrium, and not just an unfortunate state of the world.) And I'll give $50 to the user who produces the second largest number.

I'll prime the pump with a few (LessWrong-centric) examples.

Widespread adoption of prediction markets

It seems like our world would make saner decisions were prediction markets commonly used and commonly consulted. Making the switch from not relying on prediction markets to relying on prediction markets is fraught, because it might embarrass the leadership of existing institutions by revealing that their professed estimates are not very credible.

As Robin Hanson said in a recent interview,

I’d say if you look at the example of cost accounting, you can imagine a world where nobody does cost accounting. You say of your organization, “Let’s do cost accounting here.”

That’s a problem because you’d be heard as saying, “Somebody around here is stealing and we need to find out who.” So that might be discourage

...
Top li’l pots
by KatjaGrace — 2021-01-29T07:30:12.088Z

I am a connoisseur of a certain genre of mostly-snack food, combining aesthetics, convenience and the idiosyncratic types of actual food that I like to eat (central examples of food whose substance I like, ignoring form, are parsley, farro, black lentils, pecans, craisins, dark chocolate, feta cheese, swedish crispbread, cream, ginger, brown or raw sugar on its own. Central non-examples are cinnabons, most cereals, cheetos, milk chocolate, cheese-flavored anything, pea protein, Coca-Cola, parmesan cheese, sweet potatos, spinach, beyond burgers.)

Here is a list of some of the best li’l pot style foods I have come across so far (not all literally in small pots). Links for illustration, not guaranteed to be value-for-money instances.

Ones regarding which my enthusiasm has extended to writing, photography, transcendent-style elation, notable ongoing quality of life improvement, or extended consideration of the ethical implications of eating all of them before anyone else knows that they exist

Mewe snickerdoodle peanut butter packets

Hanuta hazelnut wafers

Serenity food squashes

Jonny pops, especially cherries and dark chocolate, but also strawberry, chocolate mint, probably most other flavors

Many Marks & Spencer’s prepared foods, if you are in the UK (e.g. coconut pieces, cream yogurts, wasabi peas, cheeses, raspberry jelly, flapjacks, Our Best Ever Trifle, berries, small sausages, rice crackers, cappuccino chocolate things; but mostly I like the experience of being able to construct your own bento box of foods like this for lunch)

Ferrero Rochers - I realize these shouldn’t generally be a sustaining food, but sometimes if I lose my appetite for some reason, and yet would benefit from eating, and they are one of the few things that are still appealing

Ones I have reliably liked and eaten for some period

Ellenos yogurt: passionfruit, lemon, marionberry

Prepared rice, especially in pots, especially Minute brand. Also good with milk or soy milk on, and possibly cinnamon.

Chef soraya bowls

Any kind of squeezy apple sauce packets

Snacking cheese of many varieties, e.g. Roth Creamy Gouda Snack Cheese

Costco Ajinomoto yakisoba

Chobani mixed berry yogurt drink

Power crunch bars, especially peanut and chocolate flavors and dark choklat which are more like chocolate bars. I wrote to the company to point out that these would be excelle

...
Dumb Dichotomies in Ethics, Part 1: Intentions vs Consequences
by Aaron Bergman — 2021-01-29T03:49:10.323Z
Link: https://aaronbergman.substack.com/p/dumb-dichotomies-in-ethics-part-1

1. Intro

Over the last few years, I’ve taken three distinct “intro to philosophy” classes: one in high school, and then both “Intro to Philosophy” and “Intro to Ethics” in college. If the intentions vs consequences / Kant vs Mills / deontology vs utilitarianism debate was a horse, it would have been beaten dead long ago.

Basically every student who passes through a course that touches on ethics ends up writing a paper on it, and there is probably not a single original thought on the matter that hasn’t been said. Even still, the relationship between intentions and consequences in ethics seems woefully mistaught. Usually, it goes something something like this:

One school (usually a conflation of utilitarianism and consequentialism) says that an action is good insofar as it has good consequences.
Another school (associated with Kant and deontology) says that intentions matter. So, for example, it can matter whether you intend to kill someone or merely bring about his death as a result some other action.

Want to see for yourself? Search for “utilitarianism vs deontology” or something similar in Google Images, and you’ll get things like this:

No, I didn’t make this. This is from the first page of the search results.

2. Intuitions

If you’re like me, both sides sort of seem obviously true, albeit in a very different sense:

The consequences are the only thing that really matter with respect to the action in question. Like, obviously.
The intentions are the only thing that really matter with respect to the person in question. Like, obviously.

Let me flesh that out a little. If you could magically choose the precise state of the world tomorrow, it seems pretty clear that you should choose the “best” possible world (though, of course, discerning the meaning of “best” might take a few millennia). In other words, consequentialism, though not necessarily net-happiness-maximizing utilitarianism, is trivially true in a world without uncertainty.

Now, come back to the real world. Suppose John sees a puppy suffering out in the cold and brings it into his home. However, a kid playing in the snow gets distracted by John and wanders into the road, only to be hit by a car. John didn’t see the kid, and had no plausible way of knowing that the consequences of his action would be net-negative.

Intuitively, it seems pretty obvious John did the right thing. Even the most ardent utilita...
Where numbers come from
by Eigil Rischel — 2021-01-28T21:33:57.209Z

Crossposted from my personal website

Alternative title: Wolves hate him!! Shepherd compares the size of large sets with this one easy trick!

Previously: Recognizing Numbers

Let's do a thought experiment.
I place an empty box in front of you. Then, while you're watching, I put these objects into the box:

Then I remove these things from the box:

You're surprised! Why? Because what I took out is not a subset of what I put in. A new apple appeared.

You can do this experiment with animals, and small children of various ages, and monitor them carefully to see if they seem surprised. You can also try larger collections of apples, to see how large a collection of apples they can keep track of.

Once children are old enough to talk, you can make the experiment more reliable by simply asking them if the box is empty. But of course, there's a small window of interestingness here - children beyond a certain age rapidly get extremely good at this problem, and from a certain point humans basically never fail at this task, unless the pile of apples gets extremely large. This does not surprise you at all.

The following picture switches back and forth between two collections of apples. Can you tell whether they're the same size "in one go" - without letting it switch back and forth more than once?

This, it turns out, is actually very hard. Even grown human brains don't come hardwired with an arbitrarily powerful "compare the size of two collections" module. You can compare the visual size, which can give you the answer if the relative difference in size is moderately large. But in a case like the above, it's very hard to tell the size of those two collections apart.

Here's a simple piece of technology for comparing the size of two collections: pair of the elements one after the other. If the collections are exhausted at the same time, they're the same size. If not, whichever has elements left at the end is bigger.

Of course, this won't work if the collections are not available at the same time to be compared. This could be for a contrived reason like above, the image flashing back and forth. Or it could be for a practical reason - a shepherd wants to compare the set of sheep in the pen when he opens the gate in the morning to the set of sheep in the pen before he closes the gate at night.

So humans, so long ago that the origins have been completely forgotten, but certainly more than 20.0...
Extracting Money from Causal Decision Theorists
by Caspar Oesterheld — 2021-01-28T17:58:44.129Z
Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqaa086

My paper with my Ph.D. advisor Vince Conitzer titled "Extracting Money from Causal Decision Theorists" has been formally published (Open Access) in The Philosophical Quarterly. Probably many of you have seen either earlier drafts of this paper or similar arguments that others have independently given on this forum (e.g., Stuart Armstrong posted about an almost identical scenario; Abram Demski's post on Dutch-Booking CDT also has some similar ideas) and elsewhere (e.g., Spencer (forthcoming) and Ahmed (unpublished) both make arguments that resemble some points from our paper).

Our paper focuses on the following simple scenario which can be used to, you guessed it, extract money from causal decision theorists:

Adversarial Offer: Two boxes, B1 and B2, are on offer. A (risk-neutral) buyer may purchase one or none of the boxes but not both. Each of the two boxes costs $1. Yesterday, the seller put $3 in each box that she predicted the buyer not to acquire. Both the seller and the buyer believe the seller's prediction to be accurate with probability 0.75.

At least one of the two boxes contains money. Therefore, the average box contains at least $1.5 in (unconditional) expectation. In particular, at least one of the two boxes must contain at least $1.5 in expectation. Since CDT doesn't condition on choosing box Bi when assigning an expected utility to choosing box Bi, the CDT expected utility of at least one of the two boxes is at least $1.5. Thus, CDT agents buy one of the boxes, to the seller's delight.

Most people on this forum are probably already convinced that (orthodox, two-boxing) CDT should be rejected. But I think the Adversarial Offer is one of the more convincing "counterexamples" to CDT. So perhaps the scenario is worth posing to your pro-CDT friends, and the paper worth sending to your pro-academic peer review, pro-CDT friends. (Relating their responses to me would be greatly appreciated – I am quite curious what different causal decision theorists think about this scenario.)
Spaced Repetition Systems for Intuitions?
by A Ray — 2021-01-28T17:23:19.000Z

I often see discussion here of Anki or other Spaced Repetition Systems for learning. To me, these are great for "higher levels" of knowledge -- things more closely associated with System 2 than System 1.

Are there similar advantages to be had (and systems that exist for) "lower levels" of knowledge? I think this would apply to things that are implicit learning, intuitions, as well as System-1 level knowledge.

I want to distinguish this from "regular practice", which I don't think has spaced repetition qualities.

For example, meditation (to me) includes regular practice in equanimity -- I (so far) don't know of an effect where I can exponentially spread out my meditation practice to make it "last longer"
Running is another example, where regular practice makes me better, but I don't feel like I would get much out of exponentially spacing it (I think it could be argued that skill at running is only a small part "knowing" and largely other things like musculature, which would make this a bad example)

I would greatly value contributions of:

Studies looking at spaced repetition for intuitions/implicit learning/etc
Reasons why these might be possible or exist
Reasons why these might be impossible
Proposals to how to design experiments to test this
Covid 1/28: Muddling Through
by Zvi — 2021-01-28T16:50:06.380Z

Three different time frames, three different fronts. We continue to muddle through, with some hope that this could be successful relative to our modest expectations.

There’s the situation short term, there’s the new strains, there’s the vaccines.

On the short term front, forward looking news continues to improve, but not at the pace we’d like or that I expected, and the death rate this week unexpectedly (unexpected to me in any case) rose. All signs still point to steady improvement until the new strains have an impact, probably at a pace of something like 1% a day. Hospitalizations aren’t listed in the numbers, but they too are falling steadily.

On the new strain front, the news is mixed.

For the non-English new strains, things got less scary, as it looks much less likely that the new strains can escape and reinfect, or that the vaccines won’t work on them. If they did escape, we learned that the system isn’t capable of responding as quickly as we’d like, but perhaps under duress that would change.

For the English strain, things got much scarier. Previously, we had no reason to think the new strain was more virulent, and if anything were hoping it was less so. Instead, it looks like it’s plausibly substantially more virulent, with 30%+ higher death rates per infection. Given that this strain is about to take over, that’s very bad news.

On the vaccine and policy front, we had excellent news, as the Biden administration announced a deal for an additional 200 million doses of vaccine from Pfizer and Moderna.

There’s still a ton to do. We need to approve AstraZeneca now and Johnson & Johnson the moment they release their data. We still need to spend massively to expand capacity. We still need to move to half doses or smaller where available, and legalize rapid testing for real, and so on and so forth. But compared to expectations, I’ll definitely take it.

I’ll also take the numbers we are seeing on vaccinations. They’re not what I wanted to see when this all started, but given how things went until this week, seeing the numbers rise to 1.2 million USA shots a day, with the constraint increasingly being supply, indicates that we’ve mostly muddled through.

The exception to that is our failure in long term care facilities, which isn’t getting enough focus.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Last week: 11.9% posi

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Covid: Bill Gates and Vaccine Production
by Zvi — 2021-01-28T15:00:08.708Z

Vaccine production, and in particular vaccine production by Pfizer and Moderna, has languished for want of a few billion dollars, well within the budget of many individual philanthropists. It is an important fact about the world that none of them stepped up and fixed the problem. At most one of them is known to have perhaps made a serious attempt, with that one being Bill Gates.

So what exactly has he been up to, as a longtime proponent (to his credit) of vaccines and vaccination efforts?

I want to be clear: This is not me going after Bill Gates and saying he is bad. This is investigating the question of why it seems that no one with power can do anything useful, and investigating the person who appears to have power who people thought might be doing useful things, and who looks like he is in a strong position to do useful things, with a stated priority and even explicit commitment of spending his money to do exactly the most useful things.

I also want it to be clear that Gates has far from full control over the actions of his foundation, and for reasons he is unwilling or unable to act outside of the foundation, a pattern that seems to be common among the wealthy.

This is not about Gates being unusually terrible. Quite the opposite, he seems unusually well-meaning. Especially for his reference class.

It’s important to note that this was not enough.

Early on Gates was planning on spending billions to ramp up production capacity on seven distinct vaccine candidates, despite not knowing which one will work. That seemed like exactly the right thing to do.

That didn’t end up fully happening. Gates did not do it, as evidenced by this press release which puts total Gates contributions to all Covid-19 efforts prior to the tail end of 2020 at 1.5 billion. Which isn’t enough, and mostly went to other things. And for him, this was definitely a case of ‘someone has to, and no one else will.’

Indeed, no one else did, and these graphics comes from a BBC article asking the question “Will drug companies make bumper profits?” because somehow that’s what everyone cares about:

The “no one else will” part was especially true once Gates said it loudly enough that everyone (at the time including me) vaguely thought he would do it, seemingly without calling on anyone else to help do it, thus taking any remaining pressure off everyone else to do it, given he was ...
Taking money seriously
by dominicq — 2021-01-28T12:53:33.043Z

(cross-posted from my blog)

As a young environmental activist, I lived the stereotype by not giving money serious thought, both personally and politically. There is a point where the less money you have, the less you care about it, even though you should care more. Let's call it financial learned helplessness - a state of mind where you believe that you will never have money, so when you do have some, and you get the chance to save and compound, you pass on it and spend the money. I think this sentiment is common.

While you might say: "Well, that just proves my point that poor people are poor because of their own decisions and lack of discipline", someone else might say: "Well you don't understand that, had you grown up in the same circumstances as they did, with the same brain they were born with, you would have done the same". And then you might respond with: "Maybe that's true, but we should still say that they make bad decisions and have no discipline because shaming someone is a powerful social tool to incite change." And then someone would reply: "In an ancestral-like environment, that may be true, but in today's world, people will always have the option to walk away from your shaming, so what you're really doing is driving them away". And you might then say: "It still makes sense to shame them, because if it becomes a popular sentiment, they will have nowhere to hide, and this will nudge them to make better decisions". But then someone would respond: "In addition to being cruel, that's very unlikely. But seeing how a lot of poverty is just being born in the wrong family or wrong neighborhood, it's also false." And then this debate would become a debate about social mobility, inherited capital, or free will, which we all know doesn't exist because nothing in this world is free except refills.

All of this is related to personal financial ability though. The other side of that coin is political views surrounding money, or what you might call economic literacy. In the eyes of environmental and/or leftist activists, money is icky. It's something to remind you of the injustices of the system. There never seems to be enough of it, and who controls it anyway?

In my experience, people with grand ideas of social reform ignored money questions. How much something costs in a proposed policy is never the subject, because things generally don't cost anything.

I once sat...