trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
UBI for President
by Jacob Falkovich — 2018-10-18T15:09:08.463Z

Cross posted, as always, from Putanumonit.

Epistemic status: I am not an economist, and neither is Andrew Yang. On the other hand, it's not like the experts are brimming with great solutions to the problems discussed herein, or are united in consensus on the main issues.

Andrew Yang is running for president in 2020 on a platform of Universal Basic Income. Last week I got a chance to hear from Andrew directly and ask him a few questions about it. I came away cautiously optimistic about trying UBI (up from cautiously neutral), and massively impressed by Andrew Yang (up from not having heard of him). It’s time to talk about UBI, and it’s time to pay attention to Yang 2020.

UBI and the Labor Automation Tsunami

Yang lays out the case for urgent UBI on Sam Harris’ podcast, in an interview with Quillette, and in great detail in his book, The War on Normal People. I’ll try do justice to the idea with a brief summary.

Who is “the median American“? It is a person without a college degree, without much of a support network, and without $500 to spare in case of an emergency. She works in retail (4.3 million jobs) or a call center (2.5 million). He’s a fast food worker (3.7 million) or a truck driver (3.5 million). These millions of jobs are being automated today and will keep being so in the immediate future, along with warehouse workers, accountants, and radiologists.

Millions of Americans are about to meet the fate of the 2 million or so construction workers who lost their jobs after the financial crisis. What are those 2 million up to? In short: idleness, video games, Oxycontin, loneliness, despair. As their numbers swell, and McKinsey predicts that 15% of all jobs [1]. will be displaced by automation by 2030, this cheerful list may grow to include crime and rioting. What solutions are American politicians offering to this looming crisis?

Trump blames the cheating foreigners, even though the number of Americans who benefit economically from trade (roughly all of them) swamps the number of American workers who lose their job as a result of trade (a mere 90,000 a year). Bernie blames Amazon and Walmart, the two companies that besides providing massive consumer surplus are also the employer-of-last-resort to more than 2 million low-skilled American workers. Other politicians mumble about “retraining”, but current government retraining programs are both tiny and inefficien...
Being a Robust Agent
by Raemon — 2018-10-18T07:00:00.000Z

Second version, updated for the 2018 Review. See change notes.

There's a concept which many LessWrong essays have pointed at it (indeed, I think the entire sequences are exploring). But I don't think there's a single post really spelling it out explicitly:

You might want to become a more robust, coherent agent.

By default, humans are a kludgy bundle of impulses. But we have the ability to reflect upon our decision making, and the implications thereof, and derive better overall policies.

Some people find this naturally motivating –it's aesthetically appealing to be a coherent agent. But if you don't find naturally appealing, the reason I think it’s worth considering is robustness – being able to succeed at novel challenges in complex domains.

This is related to being instrumentally rational, but I don’t think they’re identical. If your goals are simple and well-understood, and you're interfacing in a social domain with clear rules, and/or you’re operating in domains that the ancestral environment would have reasonably prepared you for… the most instrumentally rational thing might be to just follow your instincts or common folk-wisdom.

But instinct and common wisdom often aren’t enough, such as when...

You expect your environment to change, and default-strategies to stop working.
You are attempting complicated plans for which there is no common wisdom, or where you will run into many edge-cases.
You need to coordinate with other agents in ways that don’t have existing, reliable coordination mechanisms.
You expect instincts or common wisdom to be wrong in particular ways.
You are trying to outperform common wisdom. (i.e. you’re a maximizer instead of a satisficer, or are in competition with other people following common wisdom)

In those cases, you may need to develop strategies from the ground up. Your initial attempts may actually be worse than the common wisdom. But in the longterm, if you can acquire gears-level understanding of yourself, the world and other agents, you might eventually outperform the default strategies.

Elements of Robust Agency

I think of Robust Agency as having a few components. This is not exhaustive, but an illustrative overview:

Deliberate Agency
Gears-level-understanding of yourself
Coherence and Consistency
Game Theoretic Soundness

Deliberate Agency

First, you need to decide to be any kind of deliberate agent at all. Don't just go along with what...
Trying for Five Minutes on AI Strategy
by Vaughn Papenhausen — 2018-10-17T16:18:31.597Z

Epistemic Status: I know basically nothing about any of this, or at least no more than any other LessWronger, I just happened to listen to some podcasts about AI strategy recently and decided to try my hand.

Epistemic Effort: Probably about an hour of thought cumulatively, plus maybe two hours to write this up

Global Coordination

AI, like many other x-risks, is in part a global coordination problem. As I see it, there are two main subproblems here: the problem of "where to go" (i.e. how to coordinate and what to coordinate on), and the problem of "how to get there from here" (taking into account the inadequacies present in our actual, real-life political systems).

Putting this another way: there is a top-down way of looking at the problem, which is: if we imagine what the world would be like if we managed to globally coordinate on stopping AI risk, what would that look like? What coordination mechanisms would we have used, etc. And then there is a bottom-up way of looking at it, which is: there are certain people in the world who are already, right now, concerned about AI risk. What series of actions could those people perform that would ensure (or as close to "ensure" as we can muster) that AI risk would be mitigated? (Though see this post from Benquo for a forceful objection to this line of thinking that I don't yet know how to take into account.)

As far as I can tell, there are three classes of solutions to the bottom-up version of the problem:

Work unilaterally, outside of states

Get people who are already in positions of power within states to care about the problem (by which I mean be fully willing to implement their end of a solution. Merely believing it's important in the abstract doesn't count).

Get people who already care about the problem into positions of power within states.

Solutions in class 1 may, of course, not be sufficient, if state coordination ends up being unavoidably necessary to solve the problem. Solutions in class 2 and 3 run into various problems described in Inadequate Equilibria; in particular, class 2 solutions face the "lemons problem." I don't (yet) have anything especially original to say about how to solve these problems (I'd be highly grateful for reading suggestions of places where people have proposed solutions/workarounds to the problems in Inadequate Equilibria, outside the book itself of course).

As for the top-down part

...
Do Animals Have Rights?
by Vizi Andrei — 2018-10-17T15:22:58.768Z

[Regard this article as a draft; unfinished piece of writing]

I’m not writing this article particularly because I seek to provide some answers – but because I seek to get some.

I recently came across a reasonably plausible – at least seemingly – take which transparently suggests that animals do not have rights. Jordan Peterson, an apparently infamous Canadian thinker, clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, expressed it. I find it worth considering. Let’s have a look at it (I paraphrased it).

Animals do not have rights. Human beings have rights. Rights are not "inside" or part of a person. They are part of the complex agreements that make up civilized society. Or, in other words, they represent a story which educated human beings choose to believe in order to cooperate flexibly and in large numbers. They (or we) act upon this story as though it were a reality – because it massively comes in handy.

My right to freedom, for example, is your obligation to let me speak and act with a minimum of interference. Thus, each of my rights is your obligation. And each of your rights is, simultaneously, my obligation.

Animals cannot shoulder an obligation. Thus, they cannot participate in the complex social contract that structures rights.

This does not mean that we should treat them any old way. But it does mean that the proper treatment of animals is not predicated upon their "rights.”

This also explains why you don't have a "right" to medical care. Someone else has to provide it. If you have a right to it, then the provider, who has no choice but to provide it, is no more than a slave. Thus, if we had to give animals rights – this would result in us being their slaves.

Why Does This Issue Even Matter?!

In order to be able to hope that humanity can make progress towards protecting animals, I believe it may be (perhaps immensely) efficient to reach a consensus when it comes to what general path we should take in order to try to do so. And, by deciding to bestow rights upon them – both legally and socially speaking – we automatically choose a path. By choosing this path, things will change – and it may be ambiguous whether for the better.

Peterson essentially argues that if we give animals rights this would cause contradiction when it comes to what the concept of “rights” means. Theoretically speaking, I...
Policy Beats Morality
by Davidmanheim — 2018-10-17T06:39:40.398Z

(Crossposted from Medium)

This is a simple point, but one that gets overlooked, so I think it deserves a clear statement. Morality is less effective than incentives at changing behavior, and most of the time, policy is the way incentives get changed.

Telling people the right thing to do doesn’t work. Even if they believe you, or understand what you are saying, most people will not change their behavior simply because it’s the right thing to do. What works better is changing the incentives. If this is done right, people who won’t do the right thing on their own often support the change, and their behavior will follow.

I remember reading a story that I think was about Martin Gardner’s column (Edit:it was Douglas Hofstadter's - thanks gjm!) in Scientific American in which he asked eminent scientists to write in whether they would cooperate with someone described as being “as intelligent as themselves” in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma. He was disappointed to find that even many of the smartest people in the world were rational, instead of superrational. Despite his assertion that intelligent enough people should agree that superrationality leads to better outcomes for everyone, those people followed their incentives, and everyone defected. Perhaps we can chalk this up to their lack of awareness of newer variants of decision theory, but the simpler explanation is that morality is a weak tool, and people know it. The beneficial nature of the “morality” of non-defection wasn’t enough to convince participants that anyone would go along.

Environmentalists spent decades attempting “moral suasion” as a way to get people to recycle. It didn’t work. What worked was curb-side pickup of recycling that made money for municipalities, paired with fines for putting recyclables in the regular garbage. Unsurprisingly, incentives matter. This is well understood, but often ignored. When people are told the way to curb pollution is to eat less meat or drive less, they don’t listen. The reason their behavior doesn’t change isn’t because it’s “really” the fault of companies, it’s because morality doesn’t change behavior much — but policy will.

The reason politics is even related to policy is because politicians like being able to actually change public behavior. The effectiveness of policy in changing behavior is the secondary reason why — after donations by Intuit and H&R Bloc...
My Hello World
by Willa — 2018-10-17T04:47:37.255Z

Hmm.

Staring at a blinking cursor on a draft post does elicit quite the runaway stream of thoughts about what on earth I’ll write about, how I would go about writing whatever that might be, all while concurrently reflecting on the impressions my writing style, content, and signals might make on any passerby.

Oh well, guess I’ll write anyways. I’ve spent too many gorram years lurking, reading, absorbing, etc. and not actively developing my writing faculties or discussing interesting things with people who are of shorter inferential distance to me that most. This seems like a problem that’s easily solved by simply starting to write, not allowing for my efforts to be vanquished by my personal perfectionist daemon, and doing what is good enough for the moment...plus, writing and participating in discussions dramatically increase the rate and quality of my intellectual development, so, yay!

I don’t think it’s possible to convey how absolutely weird it is to me to see words published with a moniker I use attached to them. Not sure if that will ever stop being weird, because isn’t it ridiculous? This whole writing thing as a “crystallization” of one’s present state of being and cognition into a less ephemeral medium is certainly a great boon to trying to have human civilization, since it allows for “permanent” records of ideas, culture, blah blah, etc. you get the point...but as a social animal it does feel rather scary to “put oneself out there” for the world to see and judge. What else am I supposed to do though? Not do that? Pah. I need to do that for a variety of reasons, including Tsuyoku Naritai. So I shall.

Next time: I’m not entirely sure what I’ll talk about, but lately I have been focusing on “how to ask good questions”, so maybe it will be about that subject.

Take care of yourself, valete
case study: iterative drawing
by brown — 2018-10-17T04:35:12.459Z

This exercise brings together a few principles from my previous posts. If you're in the mood to to a little drawing (15mins).

experiment:
pick an object (eg a cup) to draw. Divide your page into 20 rectangles. Do a brief sketch in one of the rectangles. For a few moments, thoughtfully and non-judgmentally reflect on it. What interests you, what kind of shapes are there? Draw another cup variant, noticing as you go.

This exercise is taken from the youtube video: Iterative Drawing, the fastest way to improve. 40min video. The tl;dr is the exercise above. You do a tiny drawing experiment, and non-judgementally pay attention to what happened.

Iterative drawing is an example in fast feedback loops. You try out lots of different hypothesis and explore the space of all possible cups much faster. Of all possible marks on paper you will find the once you like if you explore more. If you're to spend 15 minutes drawing cups, I think I'd rather be the person who has drawn twenty over the person who has drawn one. [1]

You are generating a lot of interesting data. And you’ve paying attention to it. Quality and quantity. Anything you notice can then feedback into the generation process. The changes are cumulative. The results of each experiment inform the next batch of theories. Maybe the handles too large, perhaps a different angle. You’re also focusing on the fundamentals, shape and proportion. Not focusing on the details.

A few doodles & interesting things I discovered:

Notes

[1] I'm reminded of that anecdote about grading pottery students by quantity. You will be marked by sheer number of pots produced. This strange metric let to much better pottery. story and discussion here.

See also: Scott Young's Portrait Challenge

Nonjudgementally looking at the world, then making an attempt to draw what's there, then observing the results is also in part inspired from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

More Brienne: an "original seeing"-esq post.
attention and awareness
by brown — 2018-10-17T04:09:20.147Z

The Mind Illuminated runs with the metaphor that using your mind is like sight. Attention is what’s directly in focus. Awareness is everything else in your peripherals.

Attention is serial highly detailed and concentrated. When you're so focused on a book or show or math problem that the outside world "doesn't exist". Flow.

Awareness is parallel, multi-directional distributed and about the relationships between things.

Attention can be split between things. This is called working memory. It’s the number of things you can hold in your mind at one time. roughly five or maybe seven? It's your mental whiteboard. A physical notepad gives you extra slots, making it easier to think. [2]

If your attention is the chef then your awareness is the surrounding restaurant. Waiters collect and schedule orders, apprentices prep ingredients. Awareness decides what is important and passes that to attention.

Our attention is one of the most valuable commodities. Carving out space to think allows you to face and make progress on problems. Extra attention has a compounding effect. Looking at the right things at the right level of granularity. Increasing the attention & awareness integration seems like a good thing.

Try: Your sight follows your attention. Try looking at this word. Without moving your eyes from the bold word become interested in your computer keyboard or something at the edge of your vision. You’ll find your eyes will want to move or they snap to looking at the keyboard. [1] That "becoming interested" thing is what I'm calling awareness.

[1] This is from Agenty Duck, damned if I know which post tho.

[2] Critch: Use a larger notebook to think better
"Now here's why I'm punching you..."
by philh — 2018-10-16T21:30:01.723Z

Related: be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness.

A premise of this post is that punching people is sometimes better than the alternatives.

I mean that literally, but mostly metaphorically. Things I take as metaphorical punching include name calling, writing angry tweets to or about someone, ejecting them from a group, callout posts, and arguing that we should punch them.

Given that punching people is sometimes better than the alternatives, I think we need to be able to have conversations about when "sometimes" is. And indeed we can and do have those conversations. Many words have been spilled on the subject.

But I think it's probably a good idea to try to avoid having those conversations while actually punching people.

Here's what I mean. Alice thinks that punching Bob is better than the alternatives. But she thinks that if she just starts punching, Carol and Dave and Eve might not understand why. Not even if she tells them what Bob has done. She thinks punching Bob is better than the alternatives, but she thinks the reasons for that are slightly complicated and haven't previously been articulated very well, at least not in a way that makes them common knowledge.

So she writes an essay in which:

She proposes a theory for when punching people is better than the alternatives. (She readily admits that the theory is not complete, nor is it intended to be, but it covers part of the space.)

She describes the situation with Bob, and how the theory justifies punching him.

She punches Bob.

I think this could be a mistake. I think she should maybe split that post into at least two parts, published separately. In the first part, she proposes the theory with no mention of Bob. Then, if Carol and Dave and Eve seem to more-or-less agree with the theory, she can also publish the part where it relates to Bob, and punch him.

I think this has a few advantages.

Suppose Alice can't convince anyone that the theory holds. Then Bob is kept out of things entirely, unless Alice wants to go ahead and punch him even knowing that people won't join in. In that case, people know in advance that Alice is punching under a theory that isn't commonly subscribed to.

Suppose the theory is sound, and also justifies punching Fred. Then someone can link to the theory post separately, without implicitly bringing up the whole Bob

...
Is It Morally Wrong To Enforce A Surrogate Motherhood Contract?
by Vizi Andrei — 2018-10-16T19:40:56.537Z

‘A Surrogate Motherhood Contract’ – a legal agreement whereby a woman consents to become pregnant, conduct her pregnancy accordingly, give birth to a child or children - all of this for another person or persons, who are or will ultimately become the parent(s) of the newborn child or children.

Both the legal and moral status of surrogacy differs widely from one country to another.[1] For instance, a surrogate motherhood contract is perfectly legal in India; German law considers such contracts clearly void[2]; in the UK only altruistic surrogacy is allowed[3]; and in Romania it is uncertain what the law says in respect of such legal agreements[4]. This clearly conveys that this topic is open to debate.

In case the surrogate mother gives birth to a child but after doing so refuses to offer it to the party that legally deserves it, she thus breaches the contract. Is it morally wrong to allow the ‘parents’ to enforce the contract and thus claim the child 'back'? The traditional stance is that the child shall absolutely stay with his biological mother and a mere fictional agreement cannot render the mother unable to claim it. German law helps us put it differently and more concretely: 'the mother of a child is the woman who gave birth to it'.[5]

Crucially, the idea that the intended parents should be able to enforce the contract and claim 'back' the baby from the woman who gave birth is usually regarded as morally wrong. But is it?

To try to figure out whether a certain action is morally right or wrong, one must not take moral convictions at face value – but seek to deploy thinking. By thinking, I mean endeavouring to recognize, strip off or question even your most deeply-rooted values; striving to entertain your thoughts unorthodoxly, whilst not necessarily seeking to come up with unorthodox views. Thinking also involves contrarian reasoning: one must try to argue against the majority view, regardless of how unpopular it may be.

I am going to contrast the traditional stance with an unconventional one offered by a prominent figure: Richard Posner - a former judge and law professor at the University of Chicago.[6] In his pioneering textbook on Economic Analysis of Law, he takes issue with the famous case Baby M (1988), in which the Supreme Court of New Jersey found the enforcement of a commercial surrogacy contract to be inadmissible....