trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Covid 9/3: Meet the New CDC
by Zvi — 2020-09-03T13:40:01.019Z

This week’s news all centers around policy decisions. The new data contains few important surprises, so attention shifts to what actions will be taken and how that will affect the path we follow going forward. The CDC’s fall and transformation into an arm of the White House reelection campaign is now complete. Others continue to come up with, suggest and criticize various policies.

Before we get to all that, let’s run the numbers.

Positive Test Counts

Date	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NORTHEAST
July 9-July 15	108395	53229	250072	20276
July 16-July 22	117506	57797	265221	20917
July 23-July 29	110219	67903	240667	26008
July 30-Aug 5	91002	64462	212945	23784
Aug 6-Aug 12	93042	61931	188486	21569
Aug 13-Aug 19	80887	63384	156998	20857
Aug 20-Aug 26	67545	66540	132322	18707
Aug 7-Sep 2	55000	75401	127414	21056

Only the West’s number here is reassuring. The South’s number here is disappointing but reflects a rebound in the number of tests after a steep decline last week. The Midwest situation continues to get worse. The Northeast has some reason to worry, but the increase is mostly explained by increased testing.

Deaths

Date	WEST	MIDWEST	SOUTH	NORTHEAST
June 25-July 1	858	658	1285	818
July 2-July 8	894	559	1503	761
July 9-July 15	1380	539	2278	650
July 16-July 22	1469	674	3106	524
July 23-July 29	1707	700	4443	568
July 30-Aug 5	1831	719	4379	365
Aug 6-Aug 12	1738	663	4554	453
Aug 13-Aug 19	1576	850	4264	422
Aug 20-Aug 26	1503	745	3876	375
Aug 27-Sep 2	1245	759	3631	334

The Midwest number is bad news, the West and Northeast numbers are excellent news. The South’s is an improvement, but less of an improvement than expected, so it counts as bad news. Deaths are on a clear downward trend in general and that should continue for at least several weeks, as the overall situation continues to improve right now.

Positive Test Percentages by Region

The Covid Tracking Project’s data has a very strange and very negative number of positive tests from Massachusetts this week, which I’ve corrected to a reasonable number.

Percentages	Northeast	Midwest	South	West
7/16 to 7/22	2.49%	5.13%	13.29%	8.56%
7/23 to 7/29	2.54%	5.51%	12.32%	7.99%
7/30 to 8/5	2.58%	7.26%	12.35%	6.68%
8/6 to 8/13	2.30%	5.67%	14.67%	6.98%
8/13 to 8/20	2.06%	5.62%	9.41%	6.47%
8/20 to 8/26	1.86%	5.78%	9.93%	5.88%
8/27 to 9/2	1.87%	6.37%	9.38%	4.78%

This makes it clear the Midwest is getting worse and not merely testing more, and the West is rapidly improving. The South’s situation remains ambiguous, but looking a...
"How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read", by Pierre Bayard
by Callmesalticidae — 2020-09-03T13:05:53.698Z

Salticidae Philosophiae is a series of abstracts, commentaries, and reviews on philosophical articles and books.

Somewhere out there is a universe where my first post here was How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, and ours is flawed by comparison. Still, I've gotten to it at last, and here we are, with everything you need to know in order to talk about How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, without having read it.

I can only hope that Pierre Bayard gets an inexplicable warm feeling in his chest at the moment that I publish this post.

Highlights

We do not have access to, or an unfiltered "true" understanding of, any text.
The first reason for this is that our experience of any text, and our understanding of that text, is filtered by factors like our experiences with other books, our preconceptions, etc.
The second reason is that, even as we are reading a book, we fail to have a perfect recollection of what we have read, transforming it into a "book we have (partly) forgotten."
More important than having read a book is being able to understand its content, its relation to other books, and so on, which are all theoretically possible without even picking up the book.
Do not be afraid to talk about a book that you have not personally read.
Do, however, be upfront about the degree to which you are familiar with it, and in what ways.

Chapter-by-Chapter

Preface

The preface is worth noting for this passage:

As I will reveal through my own case, authors often refer to books of which we have only scanty knowledge, and so I will attempt to break with the misrepresentation of reading by specifying exactly why I know of each book.

The four abbreviations which Bayard uses are:

UB, or books unknown to me.
SB, or books I have skimmed.
HB, or books I have heard of.
FB, or books I have forgotten.

Bayard also uses the symbols - -, - , +, and ++ to denote various degrees of positive and negative opinion. Together with the previous abbreviations (which will be elaborated on in the next section), Bayard would like to see this system be more widely adopted.

Bayard could have been clearer (here or in the upcoming chapters) about the demarcations between each category, however. It's unclear to me where the dividing line should be drawn between UB and HB, or (to a lesser extent) SB and FB.

Ways of Not Knowing

The primary problem is that we have prac...
What's the best overview of common Micromorts?
by Raemon — 2020-09-03T02:39:42.002Z

I want to get generally oriented on how various common risks compare against each other. I've seen some of this come up in recent Covid discussion, but I'm interested in a good article that's like "Here's all the most dangerous stuff it's likely that you do, and here's how it breaks down for various sub-activities."

This question triggered by "the first few google results not being that good."
Sunday September 6, 12pm (PT) — Casual hanging out with the LessWrong community
by habryka — 2020-09-03T02:08:25.687Z

This Sunday at 12pm (PDT), we will have another one of our weekly online meetups. This time we will simply hangout without much of an introduction. In the future we will be back with our curated talks, but my guess is having a more casual hangout meetup is actually something I would be more excited about this week.

If you're a curated author and interested in giving a 5-min talk at a future event, which will then be transcribed and edited, sign up here.

Gather.town

We will be meeting in gather.town. We will also have a backup Zoom room here, in case Gather Town breaks for anyone, which Charlie Steiner has conveniently volunteered to moderate (thank you!): https://illinois.zoom.us/j/94331893306?pwd=SitHMW93ZlJpd01oOHdjTUtYVWQydz09

Details

When? Sunday September 6, 12pm (PT)

Where? https://gather.town/hwEYAKZHNxIG2Hgo/lesswrong

Backup Zoom Room: https://illinois.zoom.us/j/94331893306?pwd=SitHMW93ZlJpd01oOHdjTUtYVWQydz09
Study Group for Progress – 50% off for LessWrongers
by jasoncrawford — 2020-09-03T00:17:10.030Z

Recently I announced the Study Group for Progress: a weekly discussion/Q&A on the history, economics and philosophy of progress, with featured guests including Robert Gordon (Rise & Fall of American Growth), Margaret Jacob, and Richard Nelson.

LessWrong members can now get a 50% discount on registration by using this link. Register by Monday, September 7.
[AN #115]: AI safety research problems in the AI-GA framework
by Rohin Shah — 2020-09-02T17:10:04.434Z

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world

Newsletter #115

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

Audio version here (may not be up yet).

SECTIONS

HIGHLIGHTS

TECHNICAL AI ALIGNMENT

PROBLEMS

FORECASTING

MISCELLANEOUS (ALIGNMENT)

AI STRATEGY AND POLICY

OTHER PROGRESS IN AI

REINFORCEMENT LEARNING

NEWS

HIGHLIGHTS

Open Questions in Creating Safe Open-ended AI: Tensions Between Control and Creativity (Adrien Ecoffet et al) (summarized by Rohin): One potential pathway to powerful AI is through open-ended search, in which we use search algorithms to search for good architectures, learning algorithms, environments, etc. in addition to using them to find parameters for a particular architecture. See the AI-GA paradigm (AN #63) for more details. What do AI safety issues look like in such a paradigm?

Building on DeepMind’s framework (AN #26), the paper considers three levels of objectives: the ideal objective (what the designer intends), the explicit incentives (what the designer writes down), and the agent incentives (what the agent actually optimizes for). Safety issues can arise through differences between any of these levels.

The main difference that arises when considering open-ended search is that it’s much less clear to what extent we can control the result of an open-ended search, even if we knew what result we wanted. We can get evidence about this from existing complex systems, though unfortunately there are not any straightforward conclusions: several instances of convergent evolution might suggest that the results of the open-ended search run by evolution were predictable, but on the other hand, the effects of intervening on complex ecosystems are notoriously hard to predict.

Besides learning from existing complex systems, we can also empirically study the properties of open-ended search algorithms that we implement in computers. For example, we could run search for some time, and then fork the search into independent replicate runs with different random seeds, and see to what extent the results converge. We might also try to improve controllability by using meta learning ...
If there were an interactive software teaching Yudkowskian rationality, what concepts would you want to see it teach?
by MikkW — 2020-09-02T05:37:08.758Z

I've been noticing some complaints (such as this post by Richard Ngo) lately about the quality of the modern LW community's contribution to the big picture of humanity's knowledge.

Ideally, if it were the case that reading something automatically made you internalize deeply everything it said, then just by having a group of people who have read The Sequences, you'd have a superteam of intellectuals. And while I do think LW is a pretty cool group of smart thinkers, that isn't fully the case- just reading The Sequences isn't enough. To really internalize the lessons that one must learn, one must apply the principles, push against the problem, see where their understanding needs improvement, and where they are good enough.

The simplest form of this is having a high-quality Anki deck that tests users on the principles, both by testing recall of the stated principle itself, and even more importantly, giving them test cases where they can apply the principles (in the same vein as Ankifying medium-difficulty multiplication problems). I have seen some rationality-themed Anki decks, but many of the cards are poorly formatted (both esthetically and in terms of learnability), and are also poorly curated. Ideally, if there were to be an Anki deck, it would be well formatted, and the cards would be carefully chosen to maximize quality of information.

Another idea that I've been thinking about is making explorables, a la Nicky Case, that would introduce important rationality concepts. This would have the advantage of providing more flexibility in experience than Anki, but also would sacrifice the benefits of having already implemented SRS.

My question is: if there were to be either an Anki deck or an explorable teaching concepts from The Sequences, targeted primarily as an aide for current LW users, but also as an introduction aimed at the public at large, what concepts from The Sequences would you most want to see covered?
The Box Spread Trick: Get rich slightly faster
by Thomas Kwa — 2020-09-01T21:41:50.143Z

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. Also, following these steps slightly wrong could result in you losing 100% of your savings. I have listed what I think are the most likely pitfalls, but still, beware.

Thanks to gilch and Mark Xu for helping edit this post, and Wei Dai for the original idea.

Summary

If you have a non-IRA brokerage account, you can borrow money on the open market at 0.55% and put it in a certificate of deposit (CD) yielding at least 1.25%. After taxes and commissions, this increases annual returns on your entire portfolio by 0.2-0.5%, nearly risk-free. This opportunity could continue for several years.

As this is $1000-2500 a year on a $500,000 portfolio, it's probably worth your time to set up if you're mid- to late-career, especially if you already do things like credit card churning. The administrative work includes making one trade every 1-3 years and a small amount of extra tax work.

Requirements

Before actually performing the trick, there are a few things you need:

A taxable (not IRA/401k) investment portfolio worth more than about $100k.

A brokerage account with portfolio margin and options approval. Portfolio margin is not strictly necessary but increases the return. I suggest using Interactive Brokers or TD Ameritrade.[1]

An account at an FDIC-insured bank (or NCUA-insured credit union) with a high-yield CD or savings account. You can find a list of such banks at depositaccounts.com, and approval is fairly quick. FDIC/NCUA insurance is limited to $250,000 per individual per bank, so if your portolio is over $500k you might need multiple banks.[2]

In total, the setup took me about 50 hours, but this involved lots of trial and error and double-checking; it can be done in 10 hours.

The Box Spread Trick

As of September 2020, some banks offer a 3-year CD yield of 1.25%, while the Treasury yield is only 0.2%. If you could borrow at the same rate as the US Treasury, you could make 1.05% per year risk-free. Sadly, you can't do this conventionally: mortgage rates are upwards of 2%, and most brokers charge upwards of 3% on margin loans. But you should be able to, because you have collateral in the form of a stock portfolio. This is where the box spread comes in.

A box spread is a combination of four options which cancel each other out so there is no risk from market movements.[3] This allows institutions to lend each other large sums of...
Russian x-risks newsletter Summer 2020
by avturchin — 2020-09-01T14:06:30.196Z

Russian opposition leader Navalny was poisoned. I read rumours that he was doing an investigation about the origins of coronavirus pandemic and its possible relation to the explosion in the Vector biolab Novosibirsk last fall. He visited Novosibirsk 5 day before the poisoning. But others said that he investigated a case of corruption there.

Meanwhile, there is an uprising against Belarussian leader Lukashenko. Putin can’t afford to lose Belarussia for military and prestige reasons and he said he prepared a group of the military to help preserve order in Belarussia. Long story short, this may escalate in conflict with Western countries, which may not like Russian occupation of Belarus.

Russia was first in the world who declared that its coronavirus vaccine is registered. But actual production is very small and it will still be tested in phase 3 until 2021. Many people said that they don’t believe it as its tested may be rigged and the results are not published. Anyway, the vaccine consists of two adenoviruses with fragments of coronavirus’ nucleotide. However, it was reported that some rich people had access to the vaccine as early as in April. Almost no deaths from coronavirus between establishment except one person, former governor, who started act against Putin - files a legal case against his resignation.

Meanwhile, coronavirus pandemic smoothly declines in Russia. Maybe even too smoothly which makes the data statistically improbable. For example, Moscow has between 650 and 700 new cases a day for a long time. However, the numbers started to grow again at the end of August and people believe rumours that the next lockdown will be from 20 of September.

A nuclear submarine capable to carry six Doomsday weapons torpedoes “Poseidon” has been launched.

Russian EMP-guns can now fire 10 km.

There was a new leak of radioactivity somewhere, may be connected with tests of nuclear-powered cruise missile.

In summer, a state-connected Russian AI company started searching specialists for in NLP and transformers, probably inspired by GPT-3.

Extreme heat hit in Siberia and affected permafrost. Permafrost in Russia and Canada contains a lot of organics which is equal into 1.5 trillion tons of CO2 But permafrost could also emit methane which is an even stronger greenhouse gas. It still not clear, which gas will be produced as it depends on...
Anthropic Reasoning and Perspective-Based Arguments 
by dadadarren — 2020-09-01T12:36:41.444Z

This pandemic has allowed me some time to finish up my anthropic arguments. The complete argument is now accessible on my website, https://www.sleepingbeautyproblem.com

My approach is a Perspective-Based Argument (PBA). I think anthropic problems often end up paradoxical because a critical aspect of reasoning has been consistently overlooked. I propose perspectives are integral parts of reasoning. If an argument seems to be purely objective and does not appear to originate from any particular agent, that typically means it is formulated from a god's eye perspective, i.e. a view from nowhere.

PBA can be expressed as follows:

Perspective and its center are primitively identified. It cannot be derived. Nor is it the outcome of any event. E.g. If Caesar ponders upon his perspective center and asks "Why am I Caesar?" Then there is no logical explanation to that question other than "it just feels so". The perspective center is a reasoning starting point. Very much like an axiom or a postulate.

Indexicals, such as "I", "now", and "here", are references to the perspective center. Each of them points to a different aspect of it. "I" refers to the agent at the perspective center; "now" the time; and "here" the location.

Due to their relationship with the perspective center, indexicals are logically unique. E.g. the concept of "I" and the concepts of other physical persons are incomparable. In plain language, it just means "to me, I am inherently special."

Indexicals' uniqueness is perspective-bounded. So the person referred to as "I" from my perspective is not inherently unique from your viewpoint. If we reason as an impartial outsider, i.e. with a god's eye view, then no particular person/time would be unique. Due to this indifference, an explanation is needed when attention is given to a particular person/time. That explanation would be, conceptually speaking, a sampling process.

Because perspectives are reasoning starting points, logics from different perspectives must not be mixed. It's like propositions from different axiomatic systems cannot be used together. A valid argument must be formulated from one consistent perspective.

Anthropic paradoxes treat all observers/moments with indifference, yet their arguments focus on "I" or "now" without any justification. The indifference is valid from a god's eye view while the special focus is valid from the fir

...
Forecasting Newsletter: August 2020.
by NunoSempere — 2020-09-01T11:38:45.564Z

Highlights

538 releases model of the US elections; Trump predicted to win ~30% of the time.

Study offers instructive comparison of New York covid models, finds that for the IHME model, reported death counts fell inside the 95% prediction intervals only 53% of the time.

Biggest decentralized trial to date, with 511 jurors asked to adjudicate a case coming from the Omen prediction market: "Will there be a day with at least 1000 reported corona deaths in the US in the first 14 days of July?."

Index

Highlights

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms

In The News

Hard To Categorize

Long Content

Sign up here or browse past newsletters here.

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms

On PredictIt, presidential election prices are close to even odds, with Biden at 55, and Trump at 48.

Good Judgement Inc. continues providing their dashboard, and the difference between the probability assigned by superforecasters to a Biden win (~75%), and those offered by betfair (~55%) was enough to make it worth for me to place a small bet. At some point, Good Judgement Inc. and Cultivate Labs started a new platform on the domain covidimpacts.com, but forecasts there seem weaker than on Good Judgement Open.

Replication Markets started their COVID-19 round, and created a page with COVID-19 resources for forecasters.

Nothing much to say about Metaculus this month, but I appreciated their previously existing list of prediction resources.

Foretell has a blog, and hosted a forecasting forum which discussed

metrizicing the grand. That is, decomposing and operationalizing big picture questions into smaller ones, which can then be forecasted.

operationalizing these big picture questions might also help identify disagreements, which might then either be about the indicators, proxies or subquestions chosen, or about the probabilities given to the subquestions.

sometimes we can't measure what we care about, or we don't care about what we can measure.

one might be interested in questions about the future 3 to 7 years from now, but questions which ask about events 3 to 15 months in the future (which forecasting tournaments can predict better) can still provide useful signposts.

Meanwhile, ethereum-based prediction markets such as Omen or Augur are experiencing difficulties because of the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) and speculation and excitement about it. That speculation and e...
SlateStarCodex Online Meetup: Connor Leahy on GPT-N
by JoshuaFox — 2020-09-01T06:49:29.267Z

Title of talk: We Got Our AGI Firealarm, Now What?

Summary: There has been much disagreement over how big of a deal GPT3 is in the larger context of progress towards strong AGI. While most pundits will claim it's not "really" "intelligent" or "conscious" or that it doesn't "understand" words, I want to make the case that GPT3 (or its near term successors) may be our final warning shot before we see real AGI emerge. And as a bonus, I will show you how to build your very own AGI in three easy steps! Why wait for Deepmind, you can build your very own paperclip maximizer!

September 13th at 10:30 PDT, 17:30 UTC, 20:30 IDT

Please sign up here by an hour before the event, and we will send you an invitation. https://forms.gle/4eeL6DX6jjBGykMJ6
Why is Bayesianism important for rationality?
by Chris_Leong — 2020-09-01T04:24:49.099Z

My impression from the Sequences seems to be that Eliezer considers Bayesianism to be a core element of rationality. Some people have even referred to the community as Bayesian Rationalists. I've always found it curious, like it seemed like more of a technicality most of the time. Why is Bayesianism important or why did Eliezer consider it important?