trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Number-guessing protocol?
by abramdemski — 2020-12-07T15:07:48.019Z

Suppose several people are guessing a number, and then find an estimate to see who is right.

The super-common protocol is: whoever is closest, wins.

This protocol is really bad. If there are three people, and I guess 50, then the other two people can guess 51 and 49. This means I'll almost certainly lose. Unless it's within 1/2 of 50, one of the other guesses will be closer.

There are lots of ways to fix this protocol. However, most of them suffer from too much added complexity. For example, squared error incentivises everyone to guess their expected value (mean). However, people don't generally want to calculate squares, and if they did, they'd still feel like the lowest squared error was the winner (which amounts to the usual protocol).

Or, we could give confidence intervals. But how should they be scored?

My question is this: what are some ways to play this game that combine simplicity with good incentives?
Launching the Forecasting AI Progress Tournament
by Tamay — 2020-12-07T14:08:39.691Z
Link: https://www.metaculus.com/ai-progress-tournament/

I'm excited to let you know that Metaculus is launching the Forecasting AI Progress Tournament, a large-scale forecasting tournament with $50,000 in prizes. Participation is open to all.

The tournament is intended to provide a proof of concept for probabilistic forecasting for key questions related to the future of AI. The aim is to generate a massive dataset of AI forecasts over a range of time-frames, develop models to optimally aggregate those forecasts, and use these to build a map of the future of AI.

Those interested may pre-register here to stay up to date on the tournament. Participation will help contribute to elucidating key questions about the future of AI. The tournament starts next week and ends mid-April of 2021.

Prizes will be awarded for the most accurate predictions made about AI advances over 6 month, 1-year, 2-year timeframes. Forecasts over longer timeframes (5+ years) will also be made. Additional prizes are awarded for well-reasoned arguments and/or appropriate models for predictions on questions, and analyses of predictions that are made in the course of the tournament.
Recommendation for a good international event betting site like predictit.org
by df fd — 2020-12-07T09:09:51.939Z

I saw the post calling for us to fix the market inefficiency on predictit.org after the election, but I was unable to join since I don't live in the US
Does the community have any recommendations or experience with any other betting platform that I can access internationally?

Google show me this one:
https://augur.net/
but I am not sure how good /reliable it is, also does the predictit for US election pay out yet or do people have to wait for January?
Toward A Culture of Persuasion
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-12-07T02:42:42.705Z

Most writers work alone at a desk. They're drawing on memories of conversations, tinkering with ideas, deleting a word, pausing, and then writing the same word again. Many advice-givers on the writer's craft suggest that the author write for an ideal reader. This solitary art form makes it important to find ways to stay in touch with the reader, but not too in touch. Historically, writing has been a way to gain distance from other people.

Social media is a new phenomenon in which there is far less of a barrier between an author and their readership. Less time to edit, fewer gates being kept, permission for lack of polish. The result is an output that is simultaneously more disposable and more permanent, feedback that is both more immediate and less constructive (to say the least!).

You don't need to hear another social media critique, of course. What's attractive about social media, the ideal of the medium, is the ability to get a remove, but not too much remove, from the immediacy of a verbal conversation. In theory, there is time to fact check, to consider words and ideas more carefully, to refer back to earlier stages of the conversation. At the same time, social media brings quick feedback, the ability to seek outside points of view, to give more weight to diverse perspectives. There is a reasonable argument that social media should have improved the quality of our discourse. Is the potential still there?

Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other platforms are outlets for many other forms of writing and conversation. Poetry and fiction, job advice, social support and counsel, explainers and how-to manuals, music and visual art, and more. But social media is most famous for producing one very special form of writing -- the argument.

An argument is a piece of persuasive writing. It is meant to persuade. Persuasion is too slinky and sophisticated a word, though, for what's on Twitter. "Argument," with its jagged edges and unpleasant vowels, does a better job. It's a cousin to words like agony, gutter, aggression, and anger. Forgive the wordplay. The point is that although social media has mostly made us more argumentative, it could have made us more persuasive. And perhaps it still can.

Persuasion is a sexy word. After all, it implies a sort of intimacy. To persuade, we have to be settled in together, committed to each other, at least for the moment. A mutual c...
The Incomprehensibility Bluff
by SocratesDissatisfied — 2020-12-06T18:26:16.168Z

I. Outlining the Bluff

If you are in a conversation with another person, and you cannot understand what they are saying, various possibilities present themselves; two of which are as follows:

They are much more intelligent or knowledgeable than you. So much more intelligent or knowledgeable than you, in fact, that you are unable to understand them.
They are talking nonsense.

In any given case, it may be highly unobvious which of these possibilities pertains. Everyone who is even the least bit self-reflective knows that – as a statistical matter - there must be a great many people far more intelligent than them[1]. Moreover, everyone knows that there are even more people with knowledge of specialist fields, about which they know little.

To resolve this problem, people look to social cues. These may include their interlocuter’s education, class, qualifications, and social position. This also extends to their behaviour: their confidence, the rapidity and ease of their responses to questions, and so on. Where arguments are textual, still other factors apply: the sophistication of their language and complexity of their arguments often ranking chief amongst them.

This presents an extraordinary opportunity for incomprehensibility bluffing: being deliberately unintelligible, to convince your audience of the intellectual superiority of you or your arguments.

The perversity of this phenomenon is startling. It is already a truism that confidence and social capital make people more convincing. It is far less remarked upon – if at all - that such factors’ efficacy may increase, as the sense that their possessor is making declines.

II. Characterising the Bluff

And there are still more fascinating characteristics of the incomprehensibility bluff to remark upon:

Of least interest, but potentially greatest relevance, is its ease. There are a great many more nonsensical than sensical statements in the possibility space of ideas[2], so it is much easier for people to confidently reel off the former, than laboriously construct the latter. This puts the incomprehensibility bluff within the reach of most , lowering the bar to its rhetorical deployment.
Another characteristic is the unfalsifiability of incomprehensibility bluff arguments and positions. A theory with a clearly logical structure and conclusions can be directly analysed, argued against, and (if flawed) refuted

...
Pre-Hindsight Prompt: Why did 2021 NOT bring a return to normalcy?
by mike_hawke — 2020-12-06T17:35:00.409Z

Feel free to modify the prompt into something like "why was 2021 even worse/more intense than 2020". Also go ahead and substitute 2022, if you think "the direct effects of the pandemic continue into 2021 for a while" is too boring of an answer.

Pre-hindsight rules/guidelines:

Both vague and specific answers are welcome.
If you answer a modified version of the question, please state this clearly. Don't leave people to infer it from your answer.
If you just want to defend the thesis that 2021 will in fact be a return to normalcy...then this is not the post for you.
Address the prompt, try to give more than 140 characters, don't be annoying, etc. (This is sort a generalization of #3)

Motivation:

- Various comments on social media about how 2020 was a dumpster fire--with the apparent implication that 2021 will be normal-ish.

- Misremembering

this tweet

in which EY says, "I'm predicting that 2019 will be a relatively normal and boring year."

- The New Year's Wariness that was burned into my mind by this comic:
Minimal Maps, Semi-Decisions, and Neural Representations
by Past Account — 2020-12-06T15:15:08.052Z

Epistemological Status: I attempt to distill the minimal map argument and provide a natural way to chain a sequence of queries together. I argue that this definition, together with reasonable symmetry constraints on the minimal map, provides an intuitive explanation for the appearance of neural networks.

Minimal Maps

Say we sample an observation (o,h)∈O×H from a state-observation pair and want to decide based only on o whether h has a property U. We can define the function χU:H×O→{0,1} to indicate whether or not an observation has the property we have in mind. Concretely,
χU(o)=χU(ho|o)={1ho has property U0otherwise
I've chosen to suppress the reference to the hidden state since it's not an observable. This could alternatively be viewed as a semi-decision that either terminates in finite time with a positive answer or runs forever. The catch is that each observation is partial and dependent on an unobserved hidden state. Here's one natural question: what information summarizes the outcome of the semi-decision?

Minimal Map Lemma: Up to isomorphism, any information in observing the outcome of χU(o) for a given o∈O is equivalent to P(χU(o)|o). Moreover, this map is minimal in the sense that any other representation gU(o) is either equivalent in information content or lossy.

Proof: First, fix some other map gU and consider the sequence o→χU(o)→gU(o). By the data processing inequality the total mutual information satisfies I(o;χU(o))≥I(o;gU(o)). Second, by definition, the event P(χU(o)|o)=p is equivalent to any observation ^o∈P−1(p) because the outcome of the semi-decision is unaffected. Because we also have o∈P−1(p) we can just write,
P(χU(o)|P(χU(o)|o))=P(χU(o)|^o)=P(χU(o)|o)
Finally, we have for the entropy,
H(χU(o)|P(χU(o)|o))=−∑χU(o)∈{0,1}P(χU(o)|P(χU(o)|o))⋅log(P(χU(o)|P(χU(o)|o)))=−∑χU(o)∈{0,1}P(χU(o)|o)⋅log(P(χU(o)|o))=H(χU(o)|o)
Thus, with respect to the semi-decision, the information contained in the probability of a decision is equivalent to that contained in the observation. □

Semi-Decision Process

At this point, we conclude that it's natural to represent the semi-decision on the observation as a probability. Now we can consider something more familiar. Consider a set of properties U={Ui}i∈I that satisfy the following for o∈O,
∃i∈I:χUi(o)=1(Decidable)χUi(o)=1→χUj=0, ∀j∈I∖{i}(Mutually Exclusive)
If the previous properties are satisfied we'...
Cultural accumulation
by KatjaGrace — 2020-12-06T06:20:02.187Z

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

When I think of humans being so smart due to ‘cultural accumulation’, I think of lots of tiny innovations in thought and technology being made by different people, and added to the interpersonal currents of culture that wash into each person’s brain, leaving a twenty year old in 2020 much better intellectually equipped than a 90 year old who spent their whole life thinking in 1200 AD.

This morning I was chatting to my boyfriend about whether a person who went back in time (let’s say a thousand years) would be able to gather more social power than they can now in their own time. Some folk we know were discussing the claim that some humans would have a shot at literally take over the world if sent back in time, and we found this implausible.

The most obvious differences between a 2020 person and a 1200 AD person, in 1200 AD, is that they have experience with incredible technological advances that the 1200 AD native doesn’t even know are possible. But a notable thing about a modern person is that they famously don’t know what a bicycle looks like, so the level of technology they might be able to actually rebuild on short notice in 1200 AD is probably not at the level of a nutcracker, and they probably already had those in 1200 AD.

How does 2020 have complicated technology, if most people don’t know how it works? One big part is specialization: across the world, quite a few people do know what bicycles look like. And more to the point, presumably some of them know in great detail what bicycle chains look like, and what they are made of, and what happens if you make them out of slightly different materials or in slightly different shapes, and how such things interact with the functioning of the bicycle.

But suppose the 2020 person who is sent back is a bicycle expert, and regularly builds their own at home. Can they introduce bikes to the world 600 years early? My tentative guess is yes, but not very ridable ones, because they don’t have machines for making bike parts, or any idea what those machines are like or the principles behind them. They can probably demonstrate the idea of a bike with wood and cast iron and leather, supposing others are cooperative with various iron casting, wood shaping, leather-making know-how. But can they make a bike that is worth paying for and riding?

I’m not sure, and bikes were selected here fo...
Values Form a Shifting Landscape (and why you might care)
by VojtaKovarik — 2020-12-05T23:56:57.516Z

Huge thanks to Veronika Žolnerčíková for drawing the pictures for this post. I am also grateful to the people who provided feedback on various versions of the text.

Comment on the epistemic status of this text: The model described here is oversimplified, but I think it nevertheless captures an important dynamic that will reemerge in more rigorous descriptions of the topic.

The Shifting Landscape of Values

In this post, I would like to talk about the relations between different value systems of different people, cultures, aliens, AIs, etc. By a “value system”, I will mean the collection of all preferences (stated and revealed), the collection of decision rules, utility function, or whatever else the given entity uses to make decisions. Rather than focusing on what exactly value systems are and how they are implemented, I would like to discuss how the different value systems view each other, what this implies for how preferences change over time, and what can we do to have better conversation on the topic.

We can view the set of all possible value-systems as some kind of an abstract space that contains points like “Alice’s value-system”, “Bob’s value-system”, “value-system of a particular alien or AI”, with “more similar” value-systems being closer together. With some eye-squinting, we can include points like “the system of values advocated for by the catholic church”, “the system of values that hunter-gatherers might have had”, and other hypothetical value-systems that might not necessarily correspond to any specific entity (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The space of different value-systems (including hypothetical value-systems).

Rather than being an impartial observer, I currently have some system of values and I have an opinion on the other systems. As a simple model, let’s say that I assign a real number to each value-system based on how desirable it seems to me. The interpretation is that if I had to choose which of two value-systems to adopt and stick with (via a magic button), I would pick the one with the higher corresponding number (Figure 2). As we can see on Figure 2, others might have a different opinion on how this "value landscape" looks like.

Figure 2: Desirability of different value-systems, from the point of v...
D&D.Sci
by abstractapplic — 2020-12-05T23:26:40.934Z

You are studying to become an Adventurer. You’re excited to begin your Great Quest, but also anxious: over a third of the graduates from your program fail to accomplish their Great Quests. And if you’re being brutally honest with yourself, your odds are probably worse than that, since your stats – while about average for the general population – are pretty lousy by the standards of Adventurer College.

STR: 6/20

CON: 14/20

DEX: 13/20

INT: 13/20

WIS: 12/20

CHA: 4/20

On the eve of your graduation, you’re visited by a mysterious fairy offering to add a total of ten extra points to whichever attributes you most want to improve. Following the college’s standard mysterious fairy protocol, you humbly request a week for research and contemplation before deciding how best to use this one-in-a-lifetime opportunity. (Your low Charisma ensures you come off as simultaneously entitled and disinterested when saying this, but she agrees regardless.)

The college Archivist provides you a complete but anonymised record of the stats of everyone who graduated last year, and whether they succeeded at their Great Quests. (The record-keeping is magically perfect, and as Great Quests never take more than a year there are no incomplete Great Quests to account for.) The rest is up to you. Where will you allocate those ten points?

I’ll be posting an interactive letting you test your decision, along with a complete explanation of the dataset, sometime next Saturday. I’m giving you a week, but the task shouldn’t take more than a few hours; use Excel, R, Python, random guessing, or whatever other tools you think are appropriate. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about the scenario.

ETA: If you want to investigate this collaboratively with other lesswrongers (or just share your conclusions without waiting a week), feel free to do so in the comments; however, please use spoiler tags when sharing inferences, so people intending to fly solo can look for clarifications without being spoiled.
AI Problems Shared by Non-AI Systems
by VojtaKovarik — 2020-12-05T22:15:27.928Z

I am grateful to Cara Selvarajah for numerous discussions regarding this post.

Choices vs Effectively Pre-determined Outcomes

Events in the world can be divided into those with mostly pre-determined outcomes and those that look more like a choice. For example, suppose you ask me to tell you a number at random. It will likely seem that I can plausibly give a number of different answers. On the other hand, if we take a random number generator and fix its random seed, there is no choice involved --- its output is pre-determined. Note that this distinction is less about whether the decision is actually pre-determined and more about how things seem to an observer. In practice, an observer will have limited information about the situation and limited ability to predict the situation's outcome. In particular, the above distinction makes sense even in a fully deterministic universe, so we can proceed without this post without resolving the philosophical discussions about determinism vs non-determinism.

On the "pre-determined vs choice" axis, it is sensible to view events involving humans as choices. Indeed, from an observer's point of view, humans are nearly always physically capable of causing more than a single outcome. However, upon closer inspection, some of these outcomes might be *effectively pre-determined_. For example, if a cash machine asks for my favourite number after inserting a credit card --- sure, I can pick anything, but it's rather more likely that I will type in my PIN. Similarly, if coal was a hundred times more cost-effective source of energy than solar, developing countries will probably build coal power plants.

To be more rigorous, we should view this concept as a continuum between "having a choice" and "pre-determined for all practical purposes". However, even the binary version seems quite useful.

Effectively Automated Services

A similar situation arises with the distinction between automated and non-automated services. A math course on Coursera.org is automated while a math tutoring session is not. And, as with pre-determined outcomes, many non-automated services are nevertheless effectively automated. Effectively-automated services often consist of several effectively pre-determined outcomes chained together. For example, the cashier in a supermarket is not a robot, but for most practical purposes, th...
Human Genetic Engineering: Increasing Intelligence
by GeneSmith — 2020-12-05T22:06:10.772Z

View my previous post on genetic engineering

In my last post I covered three different ways in which genetically engineering humans could be beneficial:

1. It could allow us to address the mismatch between our genes and our environment

2. It could allow us to reach states of higher fitness that evolution simply cannot

3. It could allow the adoption of traits that only have a benefit once a sufficiently large percentage of the population has them.

Today I will be covering a fourth benefit of genetic engineering that, although it could probably fall under one of the previous categories, deserves its own post due to the outsized impact it would likely have: increasing human intelligence.

The Basics

Unusually high general intelligence is one of the human race's most distinguishing features. Our ability to cooperate flexibly and in large groups via language and our collective belief in fictitious identities is something no other species can match. Ant colonies cooperate in large groups, but they lack the flexibility of human organizations. Dolphins and chimpanzees have complex social relationships, but cannot cooperate at anywhere near the scale that humans can.

The exact characteristics that allow humans to do this are worthy of a whole book, but if you want a nice overview of the history of human civilization and the role of language in its development, I would recommend Sapiens: A Breif History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. But before I make the case for purposefully engineering humans with greater intelligence, I think it is appropriate to explain some basic facts about intelligence that will help lay the groundwork.

Competence in abilities across multiple domains tends to correlate. An individual that is good at math will, more often than not, score highly in reading comprehension and deductive reasoning tests. This underlying factor that determines general ability has a name: g. The existence of the g factor was originally proposed by the English psychologist Charles Spearman in the early years of the 20th century. He observed that children's performance ratings, across seemingly unrelated school subjects, were positively correlated, and reasoned that these correlations reflected the influence of an underlying general mental ability that impacted performance on all kinds of mental tests. Spearman suggested that all mental performance could be conceptualized in ...