trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The absurdity of un-referenceable entities
by jessicata — 2020-03-14T17:40:37.750Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2020/03/14/the-absurdity-of-un-referenceable-entities/

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus*

Some criticism of my post on physicalism is that it discusses reference, not the world. To quote one comment: "I consider references to be about agents, not about the world." To quote another: "Remember, you have only established that indexicality is needed for reference, ie. semantic, not that it applies to entities in themselves" and also "you need to show that standpoints are ontologically fundamental, not just epistemically or semantically." A post containing answers says: "However, everyone already kind of knows the we can't definitely show the existence of any objective reality behind our observations and that we can only posit it." (Note, I don't mean to pick on these commentators, they're expressing a very common idea)

These criticisms could be rephrased in this way:

"You have shown limits on what can be referenced. However, that in no way shows limits on the world itself. After all, there may be parts of the world that cannot be referenced."

This sounds compelling at first: wouldn't it be strange to think that properties of the world can be deduced from properties of human reference?

But, a slight amount of further reflection betrays the absurdity involved in asserting the possible existence of un-referenceable entities. "Un-referenceable entities" is, after all, a reference.

A statement such as "there exist things that cannot be referenced" is comically absurd, in that it refers to things in the course of denying their referenceability.

We may say, then, that it is not the case that there exist things that cannot be referenced. The assumption that this is the case leads to contradiction.

I believe this sort of absurdity is quite related to Kantian philosophy. Kant distinguished phenomena (appearances) from noumena (things-in-themselves), and asserted that through observation and understanding we can only understand phenomena, not noumena. Quoting Kant:

Appearances, to the extent that as objects they are thought in ac­cordance with the unity of the categories, are called phaenomena. If, however, I suppose there to be things that are merely objects of the un­derstanding and that, nevertheless, can be given to an intuition, although not to sensible intuition, then such things would be called noumena.

Critique of Pure Reason, Chapter III

Kant at least

...
Lessons from Isaac: Poor Little Robbie
by adamShimi — 2020-03-14T17:14:56.438Z

Every so often, when explaining issues related to AI safety, I call on
good old Asimov. That's easy: almost everyone that is at least interested
in science knows his name, and the Three Laws of Robotics are a very good
example of misspecified goal. Or are they?

The truth is: I don't know. My last reading through Asimov's robots
dates back ten years; it was in french; and I didn't know anything about
AI safety, specification and many parts of my current mental scaffolding.
So when I use Asimov for my points now, I'm not sure whether I'm spouting
bullshit or not.

Fortunately, the solution is simple, for once: I just have to read the
goddamn stories. And since I'm not the only one I heard talking about Asimov
in this context, I thought that a sequence on the robots stories would prove useful.

My first stop is by "I,Robot", the first robot short story collection. And it
starts with the first story published by Asimov, "Robbie".

Basically, this Robbie is a robot that takes care of a little
girl named Gloria. All is well, until Gloria's mother turns into the bad guy,
and decides that her girl
should not be raised by a machine. She harasses her weak husband until he accepts
to get rid of Robbie. But when Gloria discovers the loss of her friend, nothing
can comfort her. The parents try everything, including a trip to New York, paradise
to suburbians. But nope, the girl is still heartbroken. Last try of the father: a
visit to a factory manned by robots, so little Gloria can see that they are lifeless
machines, not real people. But, tada! Robbie was there! And he even saves the girl
from an oncoming truck! It's revealed that the father planned it
(Robbie being there, not the murder attempt on his daughter),
but even so, the mother can't really send back the savior of her little girl. The End.

Just a simple story about a nice little robot beloved by a girl,
and the machinations of her mother to "protect" her from him.
What's not to love? It's straight to the point, nicely written,
and, if you can gloss over the obvious sexism, quite enjoyable.

How does it hold in terms of AI safety discussion?
Well, let Mr Weston, the father, give it to us:

'Nonsense', Weston denied, with an involuntary nervous shiver. 'That's completely
ridiculous. We had a long discussion at the time we bought Robbie about the
First Law of Robotics. You know it's impossible for a robot to harm a human
bei

...
Recommendations for a resource on very basic epidemiology? 
by Eli Tyre — 2020-03-14T17:08:27.104Z

Does anyone have a recommended textbook, video course, etc?

I'm doing my best to make sense of what's happening with COVID-19, mostly by making simple exponential models under simplified assumptions. But it seems like I could be doing better than that, if I knew just slightly more of the basics.

Furthermore, I keep hearing people use epidemiological words (like RO (R0?)), that I understand in a basic way, but I don't have an intuition for. I would like to have clear explanations so that I can make up exercises for myself , and have a sense of how the variables relate to each other.
The Danes wish to know more about the coronavirus
by Ruby — 2020-03-14T16:39:46.697Z
Link: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/the-danes-wish-to-know-more-about-the-coronavirus.html

Denmark has the 4th highest per capita number of [confirmed] infections worldwide after Italy, Norway, South Korea. This is from a friend I originally made through LW Copenhagen:
"Thanks for the excellent coverage on MR.

I lead a small team of tech workers in Copenhagen, who are donating our time and money towards building a covid-19 self-reporting tool for those citizens not (yet) in contact with health care services.

As countries shift from containment to “flatten the curve” strategies, authorities lose track of the number of non-critical cases, and to which degree people adhere to social distancing dictums. This makes it hard to predict the number if ICU beds needed a few days into the future. We’re aiming to solve this by asking all Danes for daily status updates.

Denmark is a good testing ground, but we’ll open source everything, and are building with developing countries in mind. We’re aiming to launch Monday — currently working on a green light from local health authorities.

We’re determining which data to collect. We’d love it if you’d help by asking your audience: “What daily self reported measures would you most like to see from the complete population Denmark?” (or some variation thereof).

There is of course a tradeoff between data fidelity and engagement.

What we’re considering:

Symptoms

Binary
Type
Severity

Whereabouts

Degree of social distancing
Hygienic measures

Moral

How concerned are you
Do you know anyone who’s been sick”

Are there comparable efforts to do this elsewhere?"
Possible worst outcomes of the coronavirus epidemic
by avturchin — 2020-03-14T16:26:58.346Z

There are several possible ways how current pandemic may turn into a civilizational collapse (which may be the first step of an extinction event, depending on the possibility of recovery). I will list below several putative ideas of how the pandemic could turn into a global collapse. Each of them, I guess, has lower than 1 per cent probability:

Inevitable reinfection. The virus has an ability to mutate inside the body causing deadlier reinfection later with the “personal strain"; If true, most infected will die in a few months. This is how feline peritonitis coronavirus kills.
New strain. The virus will mutate globally in a new strain, which will be deadlier, or more affect children, or better evade quarantine and sanitation.
New waves. The virus is mutating so quickly that the vaccine is not possible, and each year will be new waves of reinfections, with mortality of a few per cent each.
Famine. The virus could be contained, but only via global lockdown. The economy as we know it will collapse and eventually famine and other forms of shortages ensure. Alternatively, the virus is not that deadly, but social collapse will happen anyway as a combination of border controls, riots, civil wars.
Infertility. The virus causes long-term health effects for most survivors, like infertility, reduced lung capacity and brain damage. This gradually reduces human potential and civilisational productivity.
Nuclear war. China blames the US in the virus creation, or vice versa, and retaliates by a new virus or using other means of warfare which ends in a nuclear war.
How dangerous is it to test a vaccine without animal trials?
by Yoav Ravid — 2020-03-14T08:51:29.401Z

I saw the idea a few times (including on LW), and support it, to do/allow human trials for CoronaVirus vaccine without animal trials.

My question is - how dangerous is it for a person to volunteer to test a vaccine (both with and without animal trials)?

How dangerous is it compared to getting the virus itself?

How should someone decide whether to volunteer?
A Significant Portion of COVID-19 Transmission Is Presymptomatic
by jimrandomh — 2020-03-14T05:52:33.734Z

Epistemic status: Not quite settled science, but preprints seem to agree.

Strong evidence points to presymptomatic sources as a major source of COVID-19 infections, possibly the majority. The exact proportion is environment-dependent; awareness and public health measures reduce symptomatic transmission more than they reduce presymptomatic transmission.

The main reasons for thinking presymptomatic transmission is significant are direct measurements of the serial interval and incubation period, and the outside view of what level of public health measures have and haven't succeeded at containment.

Before delving into papers, a quick aside. If COVID-19 were only transmissible when people were coughing or feverish, containing it would be pretty easy; just tell people to stay home if they have those symptoms. Some people might try to go out anyways, so you might also set up checkpoints where people have their temperature taken and have someone listen to whether they're coughing, but that would pretty much be sufficient. Empirically, however, COVID-19 is successfully spreading in countries which have taken these measures and other more extreme measures, which is what we would expect given presymptomatic transmission, but not what we would expect without it.

(Note: You might think this means that symptomatic people aren’t contagious, but actually it just means that people who show symptoms are doing a good job of isolating themselves. People with COVID-19 symptoms are definitely contagious and need to isolate themselves and notify people they might have spread it to.)

(Note: Presymptomatic transmission is a separate issue from asymptomatic carriers. Presymptomatic transmission is when someone is contagious when they aren't symptomatic yet. An asymptomatic carrier is someone who is contagious but who never develops symptoms. Asymptomatic carriers seem to be rare, though not completely nonexistent.)

Serial Interval and Incubation Period

The

serial interval

is the average length of time between transmissions in a transmission chain; that is, given pairs of people A and B where A was infected on a known date and then infected B on a known date, the serial interval is the average amount of time between those dates. The incubation period is the amount of time between when someone is infected, and when they display symptoms.

If the serial interval is shorter than the incubation pe

...
A Sketch of Answers for Physicalists
by Chris_Leong — 2020-03-14T02:27:13.196Z

Epistemic Status: Just quickly sketched out some rough solutions

Jessicata recently wrote a post Puzzles for Physicalists. I'm not a physicalist, but I'll attempt answer these questions from this perspective anyway.

Indexicality:

Jessicata argues that indexicality is fundamental (without defining the exact sense she means fundamental) because our attempts to define things objectively don't actually succeed. For example, the indexical "my phone" could be expanded to the objective-looking "Chris Leong's phone". However, this still actually needs to be defined relatively because there could be an exact clone of me somewhere in the universe.

I agree that the only way to refer to features of the world without encountering these non-uniqueness problems is relatively. So we never really encounter anything objectively. However, everyone already kind of knows the we can't definitely show the existence of any objective reality behind our observations and that we can only posit it. This isn't exactly news.

Pre-Reduction References

Jessicata argues that even though we often define water as H2O, if the chemical composition of the substance with the properties we observe from H20 had been XYZ, we would have defined water as that instead. She then argues that a) before we knew the science we still had an initial pre-reduction definition of water b) a philosophical account of science should contain these pre-reduction definitions so we can describe how they get attached to scientific definitions.

Why are these hard to define? Consider water. For simplicity we'll pretend that it's pre-reduction definition consists of "feels wet", "transparent" and "behaves like a liquid". Let's zoom in on "transparent" as if we could explain one, we will most likely be able to explain the others too. Just like water, "transparent" has a high-level and low-level definition and to fully understand it we need both. The high-level may contain thing like "see", "object" and "light" as primitives so that we can define an object as transparent if we can see another on the other side of it. The low-level definition describes the exact physics from the object to the light in your brain. The high-level is just a description of logical relations while the low-level i...
LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-13T23:39:32.544Z

Note: This post is old, read the new major update here.

There is a lot of coronavirus information currently out there, and a lot of people have been feeling overwhelmed keeping track of all the things coming in from different sources. To combat that, the LessWrong team is maintaining a spreadsheet with all the links that we think are useful, categorizing them, summarizing them, and prioritizing them.

So far on LW we’ve tried to help by gathering links in various focused threads (course of C19, mask usefulness). These are great for getting relevant information to a narrow question, but leave a lot to be desired in terms of later discoverability, especially if your question doesn’t exactly match any existing question.

To address this, Elizabeth, Ben, and Oliver have created the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, a collection of 135 links and counting, sorted by topic and marked with importance (as judged by someone on the LW CV Mod Team, which right now is the LW admin team + me, Elizabeth, but we plan to expand in the future).

Here are the top-level categories in the database, with a prominent link from each category:

Guides/FAQs/Intros

Crowdsourced Handbook: Focused on people building technology.

Dashboards

Our World In Data Dashboard

Progression/Outcome

Outcome data: Diamond Princess cruise ship

Spread & Prevention

Model: Prevalence in Bay Area & Other Places

Science

Paper: Where in the respiratory system is CV found?

Medical System

Report of italian hospital triage practices

Shutdowns

California bans all gatherings of 250+

Aggregators

CV news aggregator maintained by volunteers

If you have a link you want to add to the database, add it to the spreadsheet by filling out this form.

Concrete things you can do with this spreadsheet

Look for papers and articles relevant to specific questions you are currently investigating
Share a link you think is valuable with other people (by putting it on the link dump page, from where it will be processed by the mod team)
Find that paper you read six hours ago and submitted but then lost track of
Get oriented around this whole coronavirus thing by reading summaries and finding good intros
Find an Introduction to Coronavirus that finally convinces your parents to hole the fuck up.

I do specifically mean your parents. My dad is an introvert who explained his surviving-a-nuclear-war plan to me when I was six. Getting him to sta

...
What is a School?
by Zvi — 2020-03-13T22:00:00.732Z

Previously: The Case Against Education

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

In a belated triumph of sanity, schools around the world are closing their doors in the wake of the Coronavirus outbreak.

The debates about schools closing make it clear how schools provide value.

Here in New York City, and in many other places, we are refusing to close to schools until (two weeks after the) last minute because schools provide free meals to poor children.

The other stated reason is because if children are not in school, their parents would be unable to work, and some of their parents are healthcare workers or cannot afford any missed paychecks.

(In the case of universities, we also have places like Harvard that took away students’ housing and thus left them with no place to live.)

These are good, real concerns. We need solutions to these problems.

But we also now know what real problems are being solved.

We have school because our society believes that one cannot leave children unsupervised or terrible things would happen, for very broad values of children. We also have school because we don’t have another way to ensure that children get to eat. And in some narrow cases, we have a very partial fix for a housing crisis.

Clearly, regardless of what the best solutions are, one could goal factor for these problems much better than ‘mandatory schooling.’

The concern that I have heard literally zero people mention is that closing the schools will prevent children from learning.

I do realize that no one is grappling with how long this is likely to last, and that in the long term they would raise this concern.

But still, I find all of this enlightening. And refreshing.
Rationalists, Post-Rationalists, And Rationalist-Adjacents
by orthonormal — 2020-03-13T20:25:52.670Z

Epistemic status: Hortative. I'm trying to argue for carving reality at a new joint.

I think it's lovely and useful that we have labels, not just for rationalist, but for rationalist-adjacent and for post-rationalist. But these labels are generally made extensionally, by pointing at people who claim those labels, rather than intensionally, by trying to distill what distinguishes those clusters.

I have some intensional definitions that I've been honing for a long time. Here's the biggest one.

A rationalist, in the sense of this particular community, is someone who is trying to build and update a unified probabilistic model of how the entire world works, and trying to use that model to make predictions and decisions.

By "unified" I mean decompartmentalized- if there's a domain where the model gives two incompatible predictions, then as soon as that's noticed it has to be rectified in some way.

And it's important that it be probabilistic- it's perfectly consistent to resolve a conflict between predictions by saying "I currently think the answer is X with about 60% probability, and Y with about 25% probability, and with about 15% probability I'm missing the correct option or confused about the nature of the question entirely".

The Sequences are aimed at people trying to do exactly this thing, and Eliezer focuses on how to not go horribly wrong in the process (with a special focus on not trusting one's own sense of obviousness).

Being a rationalist isn't about any specific set of conclusions- it's not about being an effective altruist, or a utilitarian, or even an atheist. It's about whether one is trying to do that thing or not. Even if one is doing a terrible job of it!

Truth-seeking is a prerequisite, but it's not enough. It's possible to be very disciplined about finding and assembling true facts, without thereby changing the way one thinks about the world. As a contrast, here's how the New York Times, whose fact-checking quality is not in dispute, decides what to report:

By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Th...
Stepping Up Isolation
by jefftk — 2020-03-13T16:00:02.538Z

I've been really impressed by the coronavirus response in my
communities. People are cancelling gatherings, working from home, and
generally trying their best to

flatten the curve.
Slowing down the infection rate is critical because if we can't keep
this within the capacity of our medical system the harm goes up
enormously.

Unfortunately, these are steps that individuals and local governments
are taking, based on their own assessment of the situation and without
clear guidance from the CDC. This means that there's a lot of social
contact still happening, enough that even with the steps we're taking
I think it's likely there will be a period when the medical system
will be overwhelmed.

What does an overwhelmed medical system look like, in a country like
the US? I think the closest comparison is to the the hardest hits
parts of Italy, and it looks like running out of space, ventilators,
nurses, and doctors. Hospitals are going
into triage, and people who would survive with treatment are dying
instead. This can
happen here, and with our response so far, unfortunately, I think
it's likely to.

When it does happen, you don't want to be needing hospitalization
during the crisis. This is clearly good from an altruistic
perspective, since resources you take can't go to anyone else, but
it's also important even if you only care about yourself, since there
might not be resources for you.

When might the crisis start? It looks like Italy published triage
guidelines on March 6th, and the first English-language reports
I'm seeing of their hospitals being overwhelmed are March
10th. Here's a chart of new daily confirmed cases, from the numbers Italy
has been reporting
to the WHO:

We're very behind on testing, and so we have a lot of "presumptive
positive" cases which would likely be "confirmed cases" in Italy, so
I'm going to try to use the former numbers. Since the US is much
larger than Italy, with some parts less tied to others, I'm going to
look at the Boston-Washington
corridor to get an estimate of where we are. Here are yesterday's
total cases, which are statewide but strongly concentrated in the
cities:

MA: 108

RI: 5

CT: 6 (doesn't
count presumptive positives)

NY: 325

PA: 22

MD: 12
(doesn't count presumptive positives)

DC: 10
(doesn't
count presumptive positives)

VA: 17

Total: 497

This puts us at about where Ita...