trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Beantown Stomp 2020 Retrospective
by jefftk — 2020-03-24T02:30:02.352Z

It's a bit weird to be writing a retrospective for an event that
didn't take place, but there was still a lot of planning and
organizing, both before and after the decision to cancel.

The week after Beantown
Stomp 2019 finished I started thinking about 2020. I suggested it
to the BIDA board, and people were positive. I checked with the hall,
who had the weekends of 2020-03-14 and 2020-03-21 available, and they
penciled us in. I checked with other events to make sure we didn't
have conflicts, and both weekends looked good. In early April I
booked Dereck Kalish to come back for sound, and started writing to
bands and callers. The weekend of 3/21 was better for performers, so
in late April I confirmed with the hall and sent out a save-the-date.

Then in early June the organizers of DEFFA let me know that the
school where they hold their event needed to move them from 3/28 to
3/21. While the two events don't have that much overlap and I wasn't
worried that we'd have too few dancers to make the weekend worth it, I
was concerned about DEFFA's attendance. Additionally, one of the
musicians we had booked had already committed to play at DEFFA.

Our hall happened to still have the 3/14 weekend available, and I
started talking to performers to see if we could switch, but by this
time they had enough conflicts that moving wasn't going to work.
After getting advice from a lot of people and talking more to the
DEFFA organizers I decided to go ahead with the 3/21 weekend.

In March I had started talking to the JP organizers about whether they
would be interested in co-sponsoring again for 2020, and initially
they were too busy organizing their own late-Spring weekend to
decide. Which was fine; I didn't need a decision from them until it
was time to start publicity in the fall. In late June they decided
they did want to co-sponsor.

At this point we had a date, hall, bands, callers, and sound, so I
didn't do much until the fall.

In late September I started trying to put together a committee. Long
term I think Stomp should be run by a committee, but when starting
things up a "one person just does things" approach had been lower
friction. I talked to several people who had been helpful in 2019 and
had expressed interest in maybe organizing, and ended up with five
people: me, Persis Thorndike, Sarah Hirsch, John Hawley, and Ruthan
Freese. I made ...
LW Coronavirus Agenda Update 3/23
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-24T01:05:55.234Z

Last week I announced the LessWrong Coronavirus Agenda, an attempt to increase knowledge by coordinating research between LW participants. This post is an update on that. If you want to skip to action items, check out the last section.

Last Week’s Spotlight Questions

Last week I spotlighted three questions I hoped to answer. Here's how they went.

What should we do once infected?

Tragedyofthecomments provided a great overall answer and Wei Dai a speculative answer (much more likely to be wrong, but very valuable if correct). I did some additional research and incorporated these into an overall answer, which was improved by additional suggestions from Julia Wise and steve2152. This answer should still change as we learn more, but is in a more finished state than the first two questions.

How can we estimate how many people are infected in an area?

We failed to find a dashboard that made either me or habryka go “yes, this is the one, I would be happy with just this.”

Honorable mentions go to two dashboards that are at least trying to estimate true caseload rather than repeating official testing numbers: Plague Plus, which uses reported COVID deaths to estimate prevalence, and to the Kinsa Smart Thermometer Dataset (suggested by Unnamed), which uses smart thermometers’ phoned home data to estimate the number of “excess” fevers.

Where can we donate time and money to avert coronavirus deaths?

Neither of us found what we were hoping for here either. We’ll continue to add opportunities to the link DB as appropriate, and welcome additional suggestions. Until then I’d suggest being on the lookout for high context opportunities that can’t be captured in answers aimed at a broad audience.

Other Highlights Of The Week

This 22 page document on the biology, economics, and logistics of testing for COVID-19, by Jeffrey Ladish, Edward Perello, Sean Ward, and Tessa Alexanian..

Oxygen Supplementation 101 from Sarah Constantin

This video from virology professor Michael Emerman explain the basic biology of coronavirus and epidemics

Changes To The Agenda

All three spotlight questions are being retired from the spotlight, although they remain open to new answers and updates.

“What is the basic science of coronavirus?” is skipping its moment in the sun due to being provisionally answered by the video linked above. Tha...
What will the economic effects of COVID-19 be?
by Elizabeth — 2020-03-24T00:59:18.103Z

Obviously there's a lot of potential answers to this and it's hard to comprehensive. That's okay. The goal is to make incremental progress on the broad topic and identify specific points that would benefit from further research.

Note: These questions are intended to provoke more babble than prune. But even the babbliest thing should be presented such that other people can build on it. So if you have a prediction, share the reasoning or data behind it as well.

Note 2: This question has more potential to get political than most. I’m not going to disallow that, because the political process is crucial to what’s going to happen in the next few months, but please tread very very carefully, and I’m going to be fairly aggressive at curbing potential demon threads.

Note 3/31/2020: Renamed from "What will the economic effects of a 3 week quarantine be? 3 months?" to current title, which better reflects how we were treating it.
[Petition] We Call for Open Anonymized Medical Data on COVID-19 and Aging-Related Risk Factors
by avturchin — 2020-03-23T21:44:34.072Z

We, on behalf of Open Longevity, together with the International Longevity Alliance, wrote a letter to WHO about the need for open anonymized medical data on patients with COVID-19 and the risk factors associated with aging. If WHO listens to us, this will accelerate the development of therapies against coronaviruses and against risk factors, and help fight future epidemics. The letter was signed by scientists from the USA, Europe, Israel and Russia, as well as longevity activists.

We are confident that WHO is now receiving a lot of requests and our letter will be lost in the information noise if we do not make additional efforts to promote it. Therefore, we have prepared a petition to be signed by anyone, who agrees with us http://chng.it/cLwkxSsP

If the arguments presented in the petition seem reasonable to you, please sign it. Repost, send it to your friends directly. This will help fight coronavirus.

What kind of data are we requesting from WHO? Medical data: medical history, blood tests, x-ray, etc. (for example [1]). And the thing is that WHO does not want to share! Here’s what they state [2]:

“In accordance with Article 11(4) of the IHR (2005), WHO will not make the Anonymized-COVID-19 Data generally available to other State Parties until such time as any of the conditions set forth in paragraph 2 of such Article 11 are first met and following consultation with affected countries.

Pursuant to that same Article 11, WHO will not make Anonymized -COVID-19 data available to the public, unless and until Anonymized -COVID-19 data has already been made available to State Parties, and provided that other information about the -COVID-19 epidemic has already become publicly available and there is a need for the dissemination of authoritative and independent information.”

For what we need open data?

However, open medical data, simply speaking, medical history (of course, anonymized, without names and surnames), is needed to:

Predict the severity of the disease course. If an anamnesis is provided, blood tests, age, questionnaire responses, etc. will be indicated, this will help with predictions;
Develop therapies taking into account risk factors or directly aimed at eliminating risk factors;
For better machine learning. The predictive power of models is very much dependent on the number of samples on which they train. This is especially tru

...
COVID-19 transmission: Are we overemphasizing touching rather than breathing?
by Steven Byrnes — 2020-03-23T17:40:14.574Z

[SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM]

Here's the CDC (yeah I know, not always a reliable source, but the Chinese government guide seems to back it up):

The virus is thought to spread mainly from person-to-person.

Between people who are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet).

Through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of people who are nearby or possibly be inhaled into the lungs.

...

It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads.

Wait, what?? This is wildly at odds with the anti-transmission messaging I've heard. Where I live (USA), I hear endless appeals to wash hands, not shake hands, and not touch your face, etc. I hear barely a whisper about the grave risks of being indoors in a public, poorly-ventilated space. I mean, that CDC page seems to imply that standing in a poorly-ventilated grocery store, even >6 feet from others, may well be riskier than touching a point-of-sale touchscreen and then immediately touching your face. (Remember, the virus stays in the air 30 minutes. [ETA: oops, I just learned that that article was later retracted without explanation.] Or as another example, the implication seems to be that just breathing inside an empty elevator (which was previously occupied within the previous 30 minutes) is quite possibly an even higher-risk activity than licking the elevator buttons. Really? Really???

(And don't get me started on masks ... Masks & googles are not only not suggested in the USA, they're actively stigmatized, despite makeshift homemade masks being I think at least somewhat effective and not contributing to the ongoing supply shortage, and goggles not being in short supply at all....)

I'm posing this as a question because I don't have enough confidence, without doing more research, to declare that our public health messaging has been so wildly misdirected (at least, the messaging I've received). Does anyone have better evidence? Or what's your take?

(Update: After reading this article and this article, I'm somewhat less concerned about air that was exhaled more than a few seconds ago, and now thinking that the main things to think about are (1) being near

...
What is the point of College?
Specifically is it worth investing time to gain knowledge?
by ADITHYA SRINIVASAN — 2020-03-23T17:33:25.639Z

So a bit of background about me before I go into the question.So I am sophomore studying Mechanical Engineering in India.

I have noticed that I have forgotten about 80-90% of the course-work that I did during the first year.Don't get me wrong,I studied the courses properly and not for the test.Still,if you were to ask me how much of the course I remember now, I would at the very best remember the general idea of the stuff I read.

This is very startling from a long time perspective.College-work in India is generally more overloaded than other countries(from what I have observed),so what this means is people consume a lot of knowledge in a very short amount of time and forget it before they can make any use of it at all(leaving aside the question whether the knowledge is useful in the first place).This occurs despite the best intentions to learn and especially so with complicated stuff.I am not just talking about the facts here but whole concepts and ideas of the subject tend to be forgotten sooner than we can find any use for them.I am pretty confident this applies in most colleges(India or not).

This throws up a host of questions for me.The major premise/reason for attending college is to gain knowledge that I can further apply to job/life.The other touted premise is "Learning to Learn or Solve Problems".If that were the objective,I fell college apparatus is a very ineffective way of achieving it(will elaborate on this if required).Assuming that the former premise is the actual one,I do not think the college system accounts for my forgetting curve.Even if you were to take proactive steps and learn the material properly,you are still likely to forget it before you use it.It is impractical to practice spaced repetition for multiple semesters worth of course work.And if you were to do it,the question here(which I will go into detail further),is it worth to put this much effort into pre-learning it,effort into remembering it and then finally using some small portion of it later on in your lives?

All this is I feel part of a bigger question:

What utility do I gain from pre-learning any knowledge at all that I am not going to use in my near future ?

This question is asked presupposing that you are not learning out of pure curiosity and rather with the hope of using it later on.Basically you expect that this knowledge will help you meaningfully constrain...
Is there value in maintaining a socialization journal?
by swarriner — 2020-03-23T17:13:31.351Z

I live in a relatively small and out-of-the-way city in Canada. My geographic region only has a few dozen confirmed cases of Covid-19. Nonetheless, we are bracing for impact.

Suppose I or someone close to me becomes a confirmed case. If epidemiologist types come asking, how much would it help for me to have a list of everyone I've associated with on each day starting now?
Ideas on estimating personal risk of infection
by jmh — 2020-03-23T16:33:29.442Z

I am currently tracking the local data for where I live to get an idea of risk level for me personally.

The model is simple, total population, reported infections (not sure if I want to try adjusting for under reporting or not but should be a simple effort mechanically even if putting a number to it isn't) and some estimate of how many people I might "interact" with on a daily basis.

The formula was the one posted on MR for calculating the probability of someone in a conference of size X being infected. Not quite the same but don't mind having an over stated risk.

One thing I'm wondering about is how to estimate the number of people in "the conference". This has to be the number of people I might randomly cross paths with that could transfer the virus to me. Since some of the risk then comes from being in public places, such as a grocery store, I'm wondering how best to think about that setting.

One way would be to think about the average daily shoppers and workers at the store. Another might be the number of people I am waiting in line with and passing in the isles. Clearly the two will be significantly different.

I'm also not thinking about any cumulative impact here -- not probability of infection in the next 3 month (or even interacting with someone infected over that period which is actually the calculation I am doing) but what does today look like.

Would be interested in thoughts those here have.
Deconfusing Human Values Research Agenda v1
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2020-03-23T16:25:27.785Z

On Friday I attended the 2020 Foresight AGI Strategy Meeting. Eventually a report will come out summarizing some of what was talked about, but for now I want to focus on what I talked about in my session on deconfusing human values. For that session I wrote up some notes summarizing what I've been working on and thinking about. None of it is new, but it is newly condensed in one place and in convenient list form, and it provides a decent summary of the current state of my research agenda for building beneficial superintelligent AI; a version 1 of my agenda, if you will. Thus, I hope this will be helpful in making it a bit clearer what it is I'm working on, why I'm working on it, and what direction my thinking is moving in. As always, if you're interesting in collaborating on things, whether that be discussing ideas or something more, please reach out.

Problem overview

I think we're confused about what we really mean when we talk about human values.
This is a problem because:

building aligned AI likely requires a

mathematically precise understanding of the structure of human values

, though not necessarily the content of human values;
we can't trust AI to discover that structure for us because we would need to understand it enough to verify the result, and I think we're so confused about what human values are we couldn't do that without

high risk of error

.

What are values?

We don't have an agreed upon precise definition, but loosely it's "stuff people care about".

When I talk about "values" I mean the cluster we sometimes also point at with words like value, preference, affinity, taste, aesthetic, intention, and axiology.

Importantly, what people care about is used to make decisions, and this has had implications for existing approaches to understanding values.

Much research on values tries to understand the content of human values or why humans value what they value, but not what the structure of human values is such that we could use it to model arbitrary values. This research unfortunately does not appear very useful to this project.
The best attempts we have right now are based on the theory of preferences.

In this model a preference is a statement located within a (weak, partial, total, etc.)-order. Often written like A > B > C to mean A is preferred to B is preferred to C.
Problems:

Goodhart effects are robust and preferences in formal models are measures that i

...
Against Dog Ownership
by Ben Pace — 2020-03-23T09:17:41.438Z
Link: https://dormin.org/2020/03/21/against-dog-ownership/

This essay about dog ownership helped me empathise with dogs, and also caused me to update against getting a dog; if these ideas are accurate, it'd either be much more selfish and cruel than I previously thought, or else would require a lot more focused effort in order to give the dog a meaningful life.

Most of the essay is doing valuable and interesting work staring into the abyss and trying to help you see whether there is a dystopian horror occurring around us. But I'll mostly take away from it a clearer sense of what it looks like for a non-human animal to have purpose and meaning; it feels like a conceptual update that I won't easily be able to forget or ignore. (It has helped me think more clearly about animals and their values much more than most of the philosophical discussion I've seen on the topic, and I found it more useful than much extended discussion about consciousness and pleasure/pain.)

Here's three quotes to help you understand the post and entice you into reading the whole thing.

After about three days, the dog started following me everywhere. If I sat on the couch to watch tv, the dog would curl-up under my outstretched legs resting on the coffee table. If I sat at the dinner table, it would sit beside me, and watch me throughout the entire meal. If I went to the bathroom, it would follow me to the door and wait outside. At night, the dog curled up in my bed and slept beside me. The dog started walking more, and she would almost always perfectly follow my lead; she walked at just the right pace so she stayed beside me, neither lagging behind my fast stride, nor pulling ahead. On the rare occasions she got distracted by a smell or other dog, I gently tugged on her leash and called her name, and she scurried over to me.

I found it kind of creepy.

Yes, I know, it’s a dog. But still… I felt like I had been granted a level of submissiveness from a sovereign being which I hadn’t earned. All I had done was feed and walk the dog – and I apparently did this so badly that the dog was massively depressed – and yet she worshipped me.

The following section is something the author is themself quoting from a reddit thread:

The most accurate thing I can say about dogs is I feel sorry for them. My immediate family didn’t own dogs growing up, but my extended family had farms or large acreage plots with 3-5 dogs running around all day. They eat, sleep, shit, and r

...
Occam's Guillotine
by Slimepriestess — 2020-03-23T07:31:30.344Z
Link: https://hivewired.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/occams-guillotine/

This essay was co-written with Namespace, you can also read the essay on his blog here.

This post continues our exploration of truth. Here we begin to dig into the important parts of rationality, starting with the concept of Necessity and Necessary Beliefs.
Are veterans more self-disciplined than non-veterans?
by Matthew Barnett — 2020-03-23T05:16:18.029Z

I was having an argument with a friend the other day. It went vaguely like this,

Friend: "I'm not very disciplined. At some point I'm going to buckle down and train myself to be much more disciplined."

Me: "From experience and from what I know about humans, that's not going to work."

Friend: "Why? Motivation can come from within. If you can just train yourself like you're in the army, then you can become just as self disciplined as a soldier."

Me: "Yes, but the reason why people in the military are disciplined is because they have social incentives to be. In order to become disciplined, you need to create an environment for yourself that shapes your motivation. You can't just wake up one day and become a soldier."

Friend: "Sure, you might have to set up some environment like that. But once you've trained yourself, the discipline will stick, and you will be able to self motivate yourself from then on."

Me: "This theory would predict that people who were trained in the military would be much more productive three years after their service, compared to people who were never trained in the military. Do you agree?"

Friend: "Yes, I think that is likely."

Me: "I disagree. They might be slightly more productive but I'd predict it would be pretty similar."

So who is right?

I haven't been able to find direct research, but this seems like a classic instance where a debate can be settled by simply referencing a high quality experiment.