trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Ethicality Behind Breaking the Glass Ceiling
by foxacc — 2022-03-14T17:56:14.777Z

I am a woman who works in finance.

When I originally studied finance I only went into it because I liked playing games with numbers and through some courses I had taken I recognized that there was a way to make money by solving the same math problems for other people. I was not aware of the ever-present and violent sexism within finance that I had come to realize after working in the industry.

Sexism was not thoroughly explained to me when I was young and thus when it had been occurring to me I was confused by it but shrugged it off as I was not educated on the area. When I had started to become more and more aware of the sexist things that people had been saying to me, or the opportunities that I had missed out on due to my sex, the nuances of the way society treats me, the way men speak to me, the way men view me, I realized that sexism had shaped the entirety of my life and every other woman's life and in turn, every man's life.

I innocently headed into finance to play my number games and I was met with egotistical men that put women on their pamphlets to be viewed as progressive to attract women to their firms just to talk down to them (feeding their egos further) and only provide lesser opportunities for them (so they can keep their high-paying deals to feed their egos further).

Recently I was a part of an investment fund as the only female on the team alongside 30 men. Naturally, the men told me I was in charge of attracting more females to the team to be more outwardly progressive and for a few months I ran events to advertise the fund to young females and talk about the benefits of being on the fund and the team was happy with my work. Then, I felt a pit in my stomach. A feeling of guilt. I had just encouraged many young women to join a team who talks over me, puts a lesser value to my opinion, and makes assumptions about my intelligence before I open my mouth. Their fate would certainly be the same if they decided to heed my advice. Did I just encourage these young women to join something that they will face copious amounts of sexism in?

It is no secret that women cannot hide from sexism no matter the scenario, however there are professions that are more heavily concentrated by females and I would imagine that their dealings with sexism are more minimal. This made me think about how ethical it is to encourage women to join adversi...
Technological Resurrection: Two Possible Approaches
by Alex Polischuk — 2022-03-14T17:53:43.939Z

If we consider how it is possible to implement technological resurrection of people whose bodies have been lost (decomposed or cremated, so cryonics cannot be applied), two ways come to mind. The first one is some time manipulation. The second one is some kind of data analysis, computer modeling, retrodiction and reconstruction. Everything in between is also possible.

As for the first option: often, one can read on the Internet something like “according to laws of physics, time travel is impossible,” but it is wrong. Theoretically, time travel is possible, though we do not know how to overcome a few obstacles in the way of doing it yet.

Let us go into detail. So, according to Einstein’s general relativity theory, everything that has happened in the past still exists, but we cannot reach it through ordinary cinematic motion. We must either exceed the speed of light or change the curvature of the spacetime (the latter is curved, the curvature being determined by the mass/energy of matter). Wormholes (bridges for instant movement between distant regions) can also be used.

A number of time machine math models have been developed by theoretical physicists, the most promising being warp-drive based ones. Now, active work is conducted on 1) trying to figure out where to get “exotic matter” necessary for changing the curvature of the spacetime as well as how to reduce the amount of this matter; 2) trying to do without exotic matter and to reduce the amount of energy necessary for changing the curvature. So, we may now be on the verge of getting a warp-drive. This work is conducted, first of all, to be able to carry out interstellar flights, but such a device can also be used as a time machine. So, a means for technological resurrection can emerge as a by-product of the development of astronautics.

As far as the second option (computer modeling and information reconstruction with subsequent synthesizing a person to be resurrected), efforts are made in this area, too. There is a nascent field called “quantum archeology.” According to people who conceived it and work on it, “it seeks to reconstruct our past light cone, including the brain and body states of every person in history, with high fidelity through advances in physics and computer science.”

Roughly, it will look like that: a computer model of a relevant part of the universe will be implemented, the development of ...
Omicron #16: Danger in China
by Zvi — 2022-03-14T15:50:01.929Z

What is happening in China?

Scott Gottlieb says we essentially don’t know the extent to which Omicron has spread in China.

What do we know?

We know China has not made great use of its time so far, and seems incapable of the loss of face necessary to get mRNA vaccines, nor does it seem to have stockpiled sufficient amounts of treatment for over a billion people if things get fully out of hand.

We know that China has now locked down tens of millions of people.

We know that they previously shut down schools in Shanghai, with some pretty strange implementation details.

And we know they have quite a few cases. We don’t know how many, but the official counts are certainly not overcounting cases.

“Because of the large number of cases in a short period of time, it is inevitable that there will be some panic all over the country, and Shanghai is no exception,” said Dr. Zhang Wenhong, a prominent infectious disease expert in Shanghai, in a post on his social media account on Monday.

We also know from Hong Kong what it could look like if a population that only had access to Sinovac and has had few previous infections has uncontrolled spread of Omicron. Things get very bad very quickly.

The thing I noticed right away about China’s reaction this time in Shanghai, which came first, was that it wasn’t as complete. The will to succeed seemed not to be there on the same level.

Yes, this was a series of coercive actions the West would be incapable of taking, but what reason was there to think they would work? Closing off all school-based transmission won’t slow down Omicron much. Closing schools is a half-measure. If you have reason to think schools need to be closed, and you are following China’s old playbook, than anything that makes you need to shut down Shanghai’s schools should make you shut down all of Shanghai.

In other cases, China has made this extremely expensive and painful choice, and it has worked. This time, faced with a more dangerous variant, they only closed schools and hoped the problem would go away. That is not going to work (not that it has had time to have an impact yet, but it was never going to work).

Now they’ve ‘restricted movement in many neighborhoods’ of Shanghai, but not in others, and this is still very different from the nature of previous Chinese lockdowns.

And consider what they are doing in Dongguan, wh...
Ukraine #3: Decision Theory, Madman Theory and the Mafioso Nature
by Zvi — 2022-03-14T14:50:00.948Z

This is a follow-up post to the last section of Ukraine Post #2 on the need for Better Decision Theory.

In particular I want to think more about the following result and some resulting logic and examples. If that’s not relevant to your interests and/or you’re fine with it being hand-waved later when I build upon it, you can skip or skim this one. It is definitely the first-draft longer version of something shorter that I have not yet had time to write.

Your Nature versus Your Decisions

The gap here is huge, a 24% net swing (a change of +/- 12% approving).

There is the obvious partisan divide on approving of Biden’s decisions (despite almost all Americans on both sides agreeing with the core idea of backing up Ukraine). The gap is mostly across the board.

Commentators notice they are confused. These are the first three topline responses.

Explanations are indeed offered as well, with varying degrees of plausibility.

I think there is a big difference between ‘decisions’ and ‘how you are handling’ something, and this is the heart of the problem.

I interpret this as the public, despite not knowing such fancy words as ‘decision theory’ or any of the technical thinking involved, intuiting the need for better decision theory. This is one of those places where ordinary person intuitions and models actually do remarkably well, because the dynamics have always applied to everyday life.

Thus, they intuitively notice three things in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and then they adjust their answers for partisan bias) whether or not they are right about either of them.

Biden seems to prefer better outcomes that we prefer, to worse outcomes.
Given who he is, his/our preferences, the hand he was dealt and who people believe him to be, Biden has made good decisions.
Who Biden is and who people believe him to be (e.g. his expected preferences and decision theory) are serious problems that lead to worse outcomes.

One could of course disagree that the outcomes Biden wants, here or elsewhere, are to be preferred – I am not making a strong claim here even locally, and definitely not generally, beyond that one could plausibly model his preferences in this way.

One can consider the reversed case some people might make for Putin or Trump, if one didn’t want to defend the decisions made or their stated or revealed preferences. Not that you c...
[Linkpost] Growth in FLOPS used to train ML models
by Derek M. Jones — 2022-03-14T11:28:33.418Z

This is a linkpost for https://shape-of-code.com/2022/03/13/growth-in-flops-used-to-train-ml-models/

Given the ongoing history of continually increasing compute power, what is the maximum compute power that might be available to train ML models in the coming years?
Shotgun Book Reviews: Against Method, The Knowledge Machine and Understanding Nature
by adamShimi — 2022-03-14T08:13:13.643Z

Epistemic status:

exploratory

I read a lot of books. And during my current training to improve as an epistemologist, I ended up reading even more than I usually do, on topics and ideas that I expect could interest you. But since a real book review takes too much energy, I’m just writing a bit on each book, shotgun style.

Last week I focused on general philosophy of science books instead of on more concrete analyses of special sciences. I (re)read Against Method by Paul Feyerabend, a classic of critical philosophy of science; The Knowledge Machine by Michael Strevens, a modern future-classic about the methodologies of science; and

Understanding Nature: Case Studies in Comparative Epistemology

by Hub Zwart, a weird book comparing the approaches of science and literature to understanding life.

Against Method, Paul Feyerabend

Feyerabend is legendary for his epistemological anarchism and proclaiming that in science, “anything goes”. This is the book where he introduces and defends all that.

Many of the comments, criticism and mentions I see of Feyerabend call him an epistemic relativist who denies the special position of science in terms of knowledge. And to some extent he deserves it, because he really likes to push for anarchy and liberality of perspectives. But what he actually accomplishes in Against Method IMO is something far more palatable to LW readers: pointing out the failures of Traditional Rationality (and Popper — he really likes to diss on Popper). As the title implies, Feyerabend defends the thesis that any methodology in Science is too restrictive for doing what scientists claim to do. Which means that at some point, progress will be made by breaking the rule instead of following it blindly.

Feyerabend calls this “opportunism”, and argues that the great minds in science (he names Einstein and Bohr but mostly uses Galileo as an example) are the ones who don’t limit themselves in such a way.

At this point I need to deal with the frustrating part: Feyerabend is really, as far as I can see, an epistemological anarchist. He doesn’t think that science has a special place in terms of knowledge production and perspective, even though he thinks it has a place (and in a later edition explicitly pushes for more of it against the rise of political correctness and postmodernism). The main consequence is that he likes to jump to “Anything Goes” when there’s ...
Alex Tabarrok advocates for crowdfunding systems with *Refund Bonuses*. I think this might be a natural occurrence of a money pump against Causal Decision Theory pledgers
by mako yass — 2022-03-14T07:27:06.955Z
Link: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/better-crowdfunding.html

Essentially, his version of Kickstarter has Refund Bonuses. His rationale is that there's little benefit to investigate or promote a probably-failing crowdfunding project, because that costs you time, so that could put projects in a bad equilibrium where no one will strive to believe in them tomorrow because nobody believes in them today. So Refund Bonuses breaks the vicious cycle by compensating that time-cost, by giving out a bonus to anyone who pledged, if and only if the project fails to meet its funding threshold. A paraphrasing of it is: It sends a strong signal that the project is confident that it will succeed, so if you would have been doubtful, you shouldn't be now.
And, for a worthy project, the refund bonus would rarely need to actually be paid, so it costs little to offer them.

Hearing about this, something occurred to me. I think this might be a natural dutch-book against (trap, for) CDT (Causal Decision Theory. Background: https://arbital.com/p/logical_dt/ ).

The vice of a CDT agent is that it sometimes cannot anticipate that the decisions of other CDT agents will be entangled with its own decisions.

It'll go like this: An opportunistic CDTer might decide to look for campaigns that will fail, so that they can extract refund rewards. They watch the market for a bit, develop a sense of the patterns of failure and convince themselves of a strategy.

A bunch of other CDTers do the same thing and develop mostly the same strategies.

This turns into a game of chicken.

But CDT consistently underestimates the correlation of its decisions with those of other CDT agents, because it cannot use its own decision as evidence about others' decisions.

I'm not completely sure how much CDT underestimates by.

But if it's underestimating by a lot, many of its projected failing campaigns will be driven by cynical pledges unto success. This would run against my usual intuitions about CDT... Usually, it would underfund public goods, it appears to me that refund bonuses would lead it to overfund public goods. I guess the common factor is that in both cases it's failing a collective action problem.

Very few of the CDTers would end up making money by fishing for failure payouts. The live players in this game admit that the CDT way of thinking has serious issues and they stop using it in this context (They might not know the LDT angle, so they'll just say things like "It's a fool's...
Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
by Zack_M_Davis — 2022-03-13T20:38:57.523Z
Link: http://unremediatedgender.space/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/

Go, Soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless errand:

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

—"The Lie" by Walter Raleigh

Summary

In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns: as a matter of language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw: you shouldn't be required to commit to a stance on what sex someone is in order to say a grammatical sentence about her or him.

This seems fine as a critique of the existing English language. However, Yudkowsky then goes on to proclaim, in connection with pronouns for transgender people, that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just is the normative definition. Because it is logically rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition into the very language protocol we are using to communicate."

However, this allegedly "simplest and best" proposal fails to achieve its stated aim of avoiding baking controversial claims into the language grammar. The reason trans people want others to use their designated pronouns is because they're trying to control their socially-perceived sex category and English speakers interpret she and he as conveying sex-category information. Yudkowsky's proposed circular redefinition is functionally "hypocritical": if it were actually true that he simply referred to those who take the pronoun he, then there would be no reason for trans people to care which pronoun people used for them.

The "meaning" of language isn't some epiphenominal extraphysical fact that can be declared or ascertained separately from common usage. The word "dog" means what it does because English speakers use the word that way; if you wanted "dog" to mean something different, you'd need to change the way English speakers behave. Thus, circularly redefining he and she as purportedly referring to pronoun preferences rather than sex doesn't work, if people are still in practice choosing pronouns on the basis of perceived sex.

Given that she and he do in fact convey sex category information to English speakers, some spea

...
War-prompted Disaster Planning
by jefftk — 2022-03-13T20:10:02.321Z

Last week I wrote

a short
note encouraging people to revisit disaster plans in light of

Russia's
invasion of Ukraine. I wanted to follow up to share a bit about
what this has meant for us:

I read some about how targets might be chosen and looked at
fallout maps. I wasn't able to find anything especially high
quality. In a "destroy military targets" scenario Boston-area things
are probably pretty far down the list; in a "destroy major cities"
scenario less so. Nukemap
can be useful for looking at how likely a bomb hitting various
locations is to kill you in the initial blast, which affects
trade-offs around getting out vs preparing to potentially shelter at
home. My reading is that our house in particular is close enough to
Boston that we would be unlikely to survive a bomb targeted there. If
you are at an intermediate distance from a target, where are you are
unlikely to be killed in the initial blast but likely to receive
fallout, it's worth planning for the ~15min window
between the blast and fallout arriving.

We talked as a house about
how we might handle various scenarios. This was especially necessary
since we share a car, though in most
disasters we would probably stay put. This also included
discussing what sort of escalation in Ukraine might make us leave
Boston, but we really didn't get anywhere with that.

I had put together two emergency
backpacks in Fall 2017 when I was thinking about disasters, and
this seems like a good time to think about updating them. Some things
were close to expiration (emergency food, medication) and our needs
are somewhat different (8mo baby). Additionally, I hadn't done a
great job choosing what to put in them the first time: I found this
very stressful and needed to just put some things together and be done
with it or else I wasn't going to finish at all. Julia volunteered to handle this, for
which I'm very thankful. We also looked over our emergency supplies
in general and got some things we decided we were missing.

We've started a lists for additional things we might bring if evacuating by car.

I made paper instructions for how to use the solar system and battery/inverter.

I bought water
containers for my dad to keep it his basement (we already have
some).

We moved some things around to make them more accessible in an
emergency. For example, things that we might want to bring with

...
Whence the determinant?
by Ege Erdil — 2022-03-13T19:38:25.743Z

The determinant is a rather bizarre concept when one first encounters it. Given a square n×n matrix A, it's defined as

detA=∑σ∈Sn(−1)σn∏i=1Aiσ(i)

where Sn is the symmetric group on n elements - the collection of all permutations of a set of n distinct objects - and (−1)σ is the sign of the permutation σ. Aij represents the entry of the matrix A on the ith row and jth column.

This definition means that the determinant is a sum that has one term for each permutation σ of the columns of the matrix A, and these terms are the product of n entries of the matrix up to a funny sign (−1)σ depending on the specific permutation σ.

To understand this definition, it's essential that we first understand what the sign of a permtuation is.

Signs

The sign corresponds to the parity of the number of pairs of elements whose order is reversed by a permutation: if this number is even then we say the permutation is even and of sign 1, and if it's odd we say the permutation is odd and of sign −1.

Let's do some simple examples to see how this works, letting n=3:

The identity permutation reverses the order of exactly zero pairs, and zero is even. Therefore the identity is even, or its sign is positive.

The permutation (12), which swaps 1 and 2 but leaves 3 invariant, changes the ordering of only one pair: the pair (1,2). So this permutation is odd.

The permutation (123) sends 1→2,2→3,3→1. This permutation changes the ordering of (2,3) and (1,3) but leaves (1,2) invariant, so it reorders exactly two pairs. In other words, it's even.

Another way to think about the sign is as follows: any permutation of a finite set can be obtained by repeatedly swapping two elements of the set with each other. For example, we can get the permutation (123) defined above by first swapping 2,3 and then swapping 1,2, i.e. (123)=(12)(23). This expression is of course not unique, since we also have (123)=(13)(13)(12)(23), for example: swapping 1,3 two times in a row just gets us back to where we started. However, it turns out given a specific permutation, the parity of the number of pair swaps (or transpositions) we need to perform to obtain it is well defined. In our case, for instance, while we can produce (123) out of two or four transpositions, we can't produce it using exactly three.

So that's where the sign means. Knowing this, we can work out the determinant in some explicit cases. For instance, the...