trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Prediction: Astra Zeneca approval date
by Tim Liptrot — 2021-01-19T21:59:01.555Z

It's widely publicized that the Trump administration pressured the FDA to release the vaccines earlier by reducing our evidentiary standards in light of the thousands of daily deaths. While not fond of Trump generally, I heartily agree that the FDA should end its vaccine bans earlier than it does. For arguments in favor of earlier authorization, see MR1 and MR2.

The FDA has refused to authorize the AstraZeneca vaccine in the US until the third stage trials are redone, unlike the UK which is already using them. The stated justification is that some participants were given a half dose in the first stage, and therefore the results are ineligible. The half-dose receivers actually had better protection than full-dose receivers, but the FDA rejected the trial anyway. They have said they will consider the new results in April, possibly later. Under a cost-benefit analysis the FDA's decision is pretty crazy, as thousands are dying everyday and vaccine supply is so constrained we've resorted to very inefficient rationing schedules. The potential downsides are just far smaller in expectation than the tens of thousands of lives that we could save. But if the FDA isn't using a cost-benefit calculation, what explains their behavior.

Models

Institutional culture

One explanation is that the FDA just has strange epistemology and ethics. They profess belief that claims unsubstantiated by a high-quality RCT should be treated as false until proven otherwise. That sounds like a strawman, but actually fits their justification for second-doses-fist to Alyssa Vance. Ethically the believes sins of omission do not count but commission does. Killing thousands by banning a vaccine is not immoral, but killing one person by authorizing it is immoral. Here's Tyler Cowen's best guess

At the risk of venturing into psychoanalysis, it is hard for me to avoid the feeling that a lot of public health experts are very risk-averse and they are used to hiding behind RCT results to minimize the chance of blame. They fear committing sins of commission more than committing sins of omission because of their training, they are fairly conformist, they are used to holding entrenched positions of authority, and subconsciously they identify their status and protected positions with good public health outcomes (a correlation usually but not always true), and so they have self-deceived into pursuing their s

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Best of LessWrong: Jan 10 - Jan 17
by knite — 2021-01-19T20:44:10.301Z

I'm an infovore. The failure mode for an infovore is spending too much time reading and not enough time doing. I was bit especially hard by this a few days ago - I hadn't caught up on LW posts in while and had 100+ in my RSS reader. I wanted to read them all but I knew I shouldn't.

I had the same issue with Hacker News for many years. I broke the cycle by signing for for a daily "best of HN" feed, however even this proved to be too much content. I replaced it with a weekly best of digest and that's been working well for me - the digest includes the top 50 posts by votes, so that's the maximum number of enticing nuggets of content I can click.

LW doesn't have this, so I made it. Here are last week's top posts (Jan 10 00:00 EST - Jan 17 23:59 EST, with a one day lag so Sunday posts have more time to be seen):

Pseudorandomness contest: prizes, results, and analysis 109 points by UnexpectedValues | 13 comments

Covid 1/14: To Launch a Thousand Shipments 104 points by Zvi | 33 comments

Avoid Unnecessarily Political Examples 100 points by Raemon | 31 comments

A vastly faster vaccine rollout 85 points by KatjaGrace | 38 comments

RationalWiki on face masks 70 points by Viliam | 28 comments

What is going on in the world? 63 points by KatjaGrace | 38 comments

Review of Soft Takeoff Can Still Lead to DSA 62 points by Daniel Kokotajlo | 10 comments

Why I'm excited about Debate 58 points by Richard_Ngo | 12 comments

Group house norms really do seem toxic to many people. 52 points by deluks917 | 28 comments

Voting Phase for 2019 Review 49 points by Raemon | 6 comments

Transparency and AGI safety 49 points by jylin04 | 12 comments

The impact merge 46 points by Joe Carlsmith | 10 comments

The Great Karma Reckoning 45 points by habryka | 14 comments

Discussion on the choice of concepts 41 points by KatjaGrace | 4 comments

Why Productivity Systems Don't Stick 39 points by Matt Goldenberg | 14 comments

D&D.Sci II: The Sorceror's Personal Shopper 38 points by abstractapplic | 27 comments

Review of 'Debate on Instrumental Convergence between LeCun, Russell, Bengio, Zador, and More' 37 points by TurnTrout | 1 comments

Neurocryopreservation vs whole-body preservation 36 points by mingyuan | 10 comments

Thoughts on Iason Gabriel’s Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment 34 points by alexflint | 14 comments

CollAction history and lessons learned 32 points by Ron | 2 commen

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Against the Backward Approach to Goal-Directedness
by adamShimi — 2021-01-19T18:46:19.881Z

Introduction: Forward and Backward Approaches

I first started thinking about deconfusing goal-directedness after reading Rohin's

series

of

four

posts

on the subject. My goal was to make sense of his arguments related to goal-directedness, and to understand whether alternatives where possible and/or viable. I thus thought of this research as quite naturally following two complementary approach:

A forward approach, starting from the intuitions about goal-directedness and trying to find a satisfactory formalization from a philosophical standpoint.
A backward approach, starting from the arguments on AI risk using goal-directedness (like Rohin's), and trying to find what about goal-directedness made these arguments work.

In the end, both approaches would meet in the middle and inform each other, hopefully settling whether the cluster of concepts around goal-directedness was actually relevant for the arguments using the latter.

The thing is, I became less and less excited about the backward approach over time, to the point that I don't work on it anymore. I sincerely feel like most of the value will come from nailing the forward approach (with additional constraints mentioned below).

Yet I never wrote anything about my reason for this shift, if only because I never made explicit this approach, except with my collaborators Michele Campolo and Joe Collman. Since Daniel Kokotajlo pushed for what is essentially the backward approach in a comment in our Literature Review on Goal-Directedness, I believe this is the perfect time to do so.

Trying the Backward Approach

How do we start to investigate goal-directedness through the backward approach? Through the arguments about AI risks relying on goal-directedness. Let's look at the arguments for convergent instrumental subgoals from Omohundro’s The Basic AI Drives, which require goal-directedness as mentioned by Rohin's Coherence arguments do not imply goal-directed behavior. This becomes clear through the definition of AI used by Omohundro:

To say that a system of any design is an “artificial intelligence”, we mean that it has goals which it tries to accomplish by acting in the world.

The first convergent instrumental subgoal is self-improvement:

One kind of action a system can take is to alter either its own software or its own physical structure. Some of these changes would be very damaging to the system and cause it to no longer m

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Matt Levine on "Fraud is no fun without friends."
by Raemon — 2021-01-19T18:23:20.614Z
Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-13/fraud-is-no-fun-without-friends

Someone recently told me "Matt Levine's Finance Newsletter is really good", and then I signed up. Most post so far are about... well, I don't actually know the jargon to say what they're about, but "good typical econblogger stuff" I guess.

This is an excerpt from a particular newsletter that seemed to tie into other LessWrong interests.

The link is paywalled. If you sign up for the newsletter you'll get future essays via email for free. I'm not entirely sure about whether it seemed reasonable to quote this substantively, but FWIW I endorse signing up for future newsletters.

The way a lot of financial crime works is by slow acculturation. You show up at work on your first day, bright-eyed and idealistic, and meet your new colleagues. They seem like a great bunch of people, they’re so smart and know so much and seem to be having so much fun. They go out for beers after work a lot, and sometimes they let you tag along and listen to their hilarious jokes and war stories.

During the day, they teach you how to trade Treasury futures, and it is all so exciting and high-stakes and important. You shadow one experienced trader and quickly find yourself imitating his mannerisms, looking up to him, hoping to be like him one day. “Here is where I put in some fake orders to spoof the price higher,” he says; “a little razzle dazzle to juke the algos.” “Isn’t that, uh, illegal?” you ask timidly. “Hahahaha illegal!” he replies ambiguously. You do not press the matter. Three months later you are bragging in the desk’s electronic chat room about your own big spoofing victories. As you type “lol i just spoofed em so good hope i dont go to jail” into the chat window, you feel a rush of pride; now you really fit in, you are one of them. You go out for beers that evening and you are the center of attention; everyone congratulates you and celebrates your achievements. It is a great day. Six months later you are arrested.

Now imagine the same story except that you show up at work your first day on Zoom, and your colleagues seem kinda nice but talking to them is awkward and disjointed, and you have no idea what they do after work because nobody leaves their house, but you have a Zoom happy hour once and that’s pretty awful. And there is an electronic chat room, sure, and your colleagues make jokes in the chat, but you don’t get a lot of them because they reference

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Three types of Evidence
by Rafael Harth — 2021-01-19T17:25:20.605Z

This post is about a distinction between three different ways of providing evidence that I've found clarifying.

The first is generating data. Any study or experiment is in this category. AI Alignment examples include testing approaches in toy models and conducting human experiments.

The second is pointing out data. This is when everyone already knows about the empirical evidence, but many haven't realized what it implies in a particular context. An AI alignment example is the observation that humans have an easier time learning norms than values: everyone "knows" this, but not everyone has realized that it's an argument for building norm-following AI.

(I would count reporting on intuition as a variant of this: it's also about interpreting existing data, but in this case, the person cannot explain their own argument.)

The third is arguments that aren't about data at all. Anything purely mathematical or philosophical is in this category. An AI alignment example is Functional Decision Theory.

My impression is that the first category and the mathematical subset of the third are generally considered the most respectable within the scientific literature, probably because they're in some sense the most objective. It may be that arguments in the second category are the hardest to judge. However, they have the potential to access several orders of magnitude more data than arguments in the first, and I think it's fair to say that a substantial part of the content on LessWrong is primarily about pointing out data. It may be that the blog post + karma system has an advantage over the peer-review process precisely because it's better equipped to assess the quality of such arguments.
Benefits of "micro-tracking" for personal health measurements?
by VipulNaik — 2021-01-19T14:58:51.570Z

I'm interested in understanding the benefits of what I call
"micro-tracking" for their health: tracking information such as diet,
heart rate, exercise routine, etc. at a granularity finer than a day.

Starting last year, and likely expanding further into this year, I am
using a more "macro-tracking" approach.

For instance, for supplements, this macro-tracking simply involves
tracking the start and end date of consumption of each supplement
bottle. This
means roughly one new data entry per month. The corresponding
"micro-tracking" approach would be to record each time I take a
supplement, possibly with other information such as the time of day,
relation with meal, etc.

Similarly, for food, I do record all purchases of restaurant food in
my activity
tracker
(albeit not in a computable format). I am now thinking of adding
information on the specifics of all food purchases (from both grocery
stores and restaurants) in a computable format. This is a
macro-tracking approach. The corresponding micro-tracking approach
would mean recording each meal, including information such as time of
day, quantity of various foods in the meal, etc. (For the most part I
do not share food with others, and my food waste is near-zero, so
purchases = consumption; I can record exceptions separately).

Disadvantages I see of micro-tracking:

Time: It looks like micro-tracking adds a nontrivial daily overhead
of tracking work. Time is very important to me. Even more so, time
that I need to spend daily, when I might be pressed for time on
other tasks, is even more important.

Difficulty with micro-quantification (for food): It's an extra
hassle to quantify exactly how much food I am consuming. When
consuming cooked food, I am usually helping myself from a large
bowl of prepared food and may go from 70% to 65% of it or something
like that. The food isn't perfectly mixed either, so some days I
might end up having more of the tomatoes part and other days I
might end up having more of the spinach part.

Aggregation effort: Once all the micro-quantities are entered, I
need to aggregate them to extract meaningful data. If I enter data
at a more aggregated level, this is somewhat easier.

Advantages I see of micro-tracking, and why these did not ultimately
convince me:

Better correlational analysis of day-to-day fluctuations: If I were
micro-tracking my moods, physiological measurements, and physical

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Democratic Currency
by MikkW — 2021-01-19T05:32:07.612Z

As an economics major, I have often heard it pronounced (largely correctly) that the great thing about money and the free market is that money is an extremely nimble decision-making process; money provides a way to measure how much value people can gain from something being created, or some service being done, and it also measures how much effort will be required to do so. This allows for things to be done when it creates more value for everybody than it destroys, and prevents things from destroying more value than they create. Money also allows for one person to be paid money for a large, complex service, and then for that same person to redirect parts of that money to induce other people to do smaller parts of the bigger task, allowing for coordination of large, complex tasks. This view is largely correct, and an important fact that among the general population is often missed.

But there is a slight magic trick going on here: When we say “valuable”, we haven’t defined valuable to who? As it happens, money does not measure value uniformly over all people; it measures what is valuable to those who already have a large supply of money. Now, in some sense, this is a feature, not a bug, since by rewarding primarily those who have earned money, we induce people to engage in complex chains of flow of value, as I have described above. However, currently, this is taken to an extreme: People who don’t have money can get “locked out” of the system, having their needs and desires not accommodated, even though they put in their best effort to contribute to the system, while the people who already have a large amount of money are best able to increase the proportion of value they command, in large part by investing in good projects that increase the capacity of what humanity can accomplish. It’s good that rich people can improve our abilities, the problem is that poor people are prevented from taking part in that dance to the fullest extent - I wonder how many brilliant minds are made unable to contribute their best contributions due to a lack of starting capital? How many Elon Musks, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffetts have been prevented from working their magic due to not having those first few dollars that they could eventually turned into many (helping humanity prosper along the way)?

The solution that seems obviously correct to me is have a currency (I imagine a digital ...
1Day Sooner is Hiring a Communications Director
by 1daysooner — 2021-01-19T04:25:48.279Z
Link: https://www.1daysooner.org/jobs#communications-director

1Day Sooner is hiring a new Communications Director to make the public case for our advocacy priorities.

We think this role has the potential to be very high-impact: human challenge trials can still potentially save thousands of lives by accelerating the licensure of next-generation COVID-19 vaccines and advancing our understanding of the virus. Perception of public attitudes toward these trials seems to be a meaningful bottleneck toward their advancement, making the Communications Director well-positioned to advance their cause. 1Day Sooner is also aiming to broaden our advocacy in 2021, using the network and infrastructure we've built to promote vaccination by advocate for a National Vaccine Day and other projects. We are still relatively new as an organization, so the next Communications Director will have creative say and strategic input over the organization's direction.

Applicants with a background in journalism and/or public health are preferred, but all candidates with good writing and speaking skills who can learn quickly about niche topics and make strategic advocacy decisions under significant uncertainty are encouraged to apply.

I (Abie) am currently serving as Communications Director and will be leaving the role in a couple months to go to school. I would be more than happy to speak with anyone interested in applying— feel free to email me at communications at 1daysooner dot org.

Read the full job description and apply here.
Discovery fiction for the Pythagorean theorem
by riceissa — 2021-01-19T02:09:37.259Z

I've been thinking recently about how to teach the Pythagorean theorem to high school students. As part of that thinking, I looked around to see how the topic was being taught in various textbooks, online videos, blog posts, etc. Typically, the discussion goes something like this:

First, the statement of the theorem is presented: For a right triangle with legs of lengths a and b and a hypotenuse of length c, we have a2+b2=c2.

Next, a picture like the following one is presented as a visual:

The student is told that the two smaller squares add up in area to the largest square.

Finally, any one of the typical proofs is presented. This could be a rearrangement proof, the "Behold!" proof, or Euclid's proof of proposition I.47.

One can improve the final step by using what is sometimes called Einstein's proof. (See also this post by Terence Tao, this video by Numberphile, this article by Alexander Givental, and in particular this comment by Tim Gowers for discussion and presentation of this proof.) This proof is an improvement over the typical presentation for a few reasons: it makes the theorem feel more intuitive, and (especially with the discussion in Gowers's comment) it gives some indication of how one might discover the proof.

It might seem like the "exposition problem" for the Pythagorean theorem is solved: we started with a bunch of proofs that made the theorem feel unintuitive that we didn't know how to discover ourselves, and now we have a good proof along with a story for how to discover it.

I claim that there is still some work left! I think the Pythagorean theorem is a case where even the theorem statement itself seems bizarre (rather than just the proofs being bizarre). Given an arbitrary right triangle, how would one guess that a2+b2=c2? And why would one even think this is a problem worth solving in the first place? I think this second question is easy to answer by pointing to the numerous applications of the theorem, so I will focus on the first question.

So with that background discussion out of the way, here is my proposal for how to teach the Pythagorean theorem, which is a kind of discovery fiction:

Present the problem: this can be either finding the length of a vector/line segment in the Cartesian plane (given the x and y coordinates), or as finding the hypotenuse of a right triangle (given t

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Some thoughts on risks from narrow, non-agentic AI
by Richard_Ngo — 2021-01-19T00:04:10.108Z

Here are some concerns which have been raised about the development of advanced AI:

Power might become concentrated with agentic AGIs which are highly misaligned with humanity as a whole (the second species argument).
AI might allow power to become concentrated to an unprecedented extent with elites who are misaligned with humanity as a whole.
Competitive pressures to use narrow, non-agentic AIs trained on easily-measurable metrics might become harmful enough to cause a “

slow-rolling catastrophe

”. [Edit: it seems like this is not the intended interpretation of Paul's argument in What Failure Looks Like; see discussion in the comments section. So I no longer fully endorse this section, but I've left it up for reference purposes.]
AI might make catastrophic conflicts easier or more likely; in other words, the world might become more vulnerable with respect to available technology.
AIs might be morally relevant, but be treated badly.

I’ve already done

a deep dive on the second species argument

, so in this post I’m going to focus on the others - the risks which don’t depend on thinking of AIs as autonomous agents with general capabilities. Warning: this is all very speculative; I’m mainly just trying to get a feeling for the intellectual terrain, since I haven’t seen many explorations of these concerns so far.

Inequality and totalitarianism

One key longtermist concern about inequality is that certain groups might get (semi)permanently disenfranchised; in other words, suboptimal values might be locked in. Yet this does not seem to have happened in the past: moral progress has improved the treatment of slaves, women, non-Europeans, and animals over the last few centuries, despite those groups starting off with little power. It seems to me that most of these changes were driven by the moral concerns of existing elites, backed by public sentiment in wealthy countries, rather than improvements in the bargaining position of the oppressed groups which made it costlier to treat them badly (although

see here for an opposing perspective

). For example, ending the slave trade was very expensive for Britain; the Civil War was very expensive for the US; and so on. Perhaps the key exception is the example of anti-colonialist movements - but even then, public moral pressure (e.g. opposition to harming non-violent protesters) was a key factor.

What would reduce the efficacy of public mor...