trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Germs and Politics  
by Savio Coelho — 2021-03-01T21:57:15.190Z

2020 was marked by a series of serious international tensions. We had a geopolitical crisis in the Middle East due to the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and threats of war between the United States and Iran, an intensification of the trade war between the U.S and China and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia on the price barrel of oil on the international market.
However, no such crisis will be as impactful for the current generation as the coronavirus pandemic. Since it appeared in China, SARS-Cov-2, also called COVID-19, has spread around the world extremely quickly due to the intercommunication of the global value chains and population flows and caused a complete collapse of the globalized economic system in which we lived until then.
Many people are concerned about the long-term effects of this pandemic. How will it impact employment? How will it affect the way we organize the international economy? How will the global value chains look after this? How will people react after the pandemic? What will be the social and cultural impacts of this disease?
In any case, what is taken for granted is that the world will be quite different after the end of the pandemic.
Most people generally tend to focus on the economic consequences. However, what few people seem to be noticing is that the virus can have effects that go beyond our physical and financial health. Germs and parasites can affect the way we organize our public life, how our legal and political institutions work and, in short, the entire social order of a nation.
It was not uncommon, already in March, the appearance of "coronavirus dictatorships" across the globe. Here I am not making a typical hysterical libertarian reference that lockdowns are new forms of techno-fascism. In several countries, political leaders have acquired emergency powers, almost total, in the face of the danger posed by the disease. In Hungary, the parliament endorsed Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to govern by decree (that is, pass measures, including that of closing the parliament, without the prior approval of members of the legislature) until July, but even today (2021) he seeks to continue the "emergency". In the Philippines, parliament has strengthened President Rodrigo Duterte's powers and he now has broad control over the state budget and has the power to freely punish ...
A thought on gym membership models and from there the whole world…
by Curious Couch Potato — 2021-03-01T21:56:56.954Z

I read somewhere that gyms are designed to maximize members and minimize users. This makes sense when one thinks about it. Members pay money, whether they use the gym services or not. Users require equipment and employees to manage the equipment. Users also want classes with instructors and showers with hot water. Members are very non demanding people. Gym users are demanding. Gyms therefore are a very interesting model to look at for how they are set up and priced. A gym that is packed to the gills has minimized the equipment and space needed per gym user (lowering that pesky cost in the denominator of their margin). But they are not going to attract new members (those quiet paying folk) with a line 3 people deep for a bench press. They also run into another issue. Potential members do not come to them expecting to be suckers that pay every month for services they do not collect. They plan on being users. So to play to their idea that these potential members can get their money’s worth from their membership dues, the gym must present to them a gym where they think they can get said worth. So we are back to the mantra of a profitable gym: maximize members, minimize users. Their pricing model is even set up to encourage this. Often, gyms will have day use fees, where someone can use the gym for the day for a fee. Those fees tend to be exorbitant to encourage fewer users and more members. Someone paying a day fee is a guaranteed user with a chance of breaking expensive fitness equipment or getting hurt and suing the gym. And so, often the membership fees are nearly the same or barely more than a day use fee. All the gym wants is a credit card or bank account on file with the authorization to ever so gently sip from it every month.

This then leads into how they charge monthly. Typically, a gym charges a one time fee at the start of every month. This is a classic example of a sunk cost, but where our brains can actually pierce the fallacy, if even just subconsciously. That monthly fee, say $30 a month for a nice round number going forward, is a sunk cost to you after they have charged it. You are not getting it back whether you go to the gym or not that month. Now, they have gotten their $30 for the month and you are faced with the exercise dilemma every day. “Go to the gym, or sleep in? Go to the gym, or go home to recover from a tough day at work by eatin...
Forecasting Newsletter: February 2021
by NunoSempere — 2021-03-01T21:51:27.758Z

Highlights

Biden orders the creation of a

National Center for Epidemic Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics

Americans get a

clone

of Betfair/Smarkets, expected to be marginally better than PredictIt
Hypermind has a new forecasting tournament on the

future of AI in 2023

Index

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms
In The News
Recent Blog Posts
Personal Forecasts
Hard To Categorize
Long Content

Sign up

here

or browse past newsletters

here

.

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms

A new US company,

Kalshi

, has gotten

regulatory approval

from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to create a betting platform. I don't really have many thoughts given that they haven't launched yet. I expect them to use newer technologies than PredictIt just because they are newer, and I expect them to have somewhat lower fees because it would make business sense. They are planning to open in March. From the

Wall Street Journal

(unpaywalled

archive link

):

Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia and a Kalshi board member, said Kalshi’s embrace of regulation was one of the reasons his firm invested in the startup. “They’re taking regulation fairly seriously,” he said. “Companies that move fast and break things are not going to work in this regulated environment.”

Hypermind

has a new forecasting tournament:

Where will AI be in 2023?

, with a prize pot worth $7,000 so far.

Forecasters on Good Judgment Open have the opportunity to receive feedback from superforecasters if they participate in the

Think Again challenge

, make 10 predictions and complete a survey.

With

QURI

, I've been improving

Metaforecast

, a search tool for probabilities. It now has more prediction platforms, a nicer interface, and more search options. Readers might be interested in

COVID predictions

, readers from the EA movement might be particularly interested in

all GiveWell and OpenPhilanthropy predictions

.

Metaforecast search for "Israel"

In the News

Biden ordered the creation of a

National Center for Epidemic Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics

(

secondary source

). The new agency looks somewhat related to a previous proposal mentioned in this newsletter: Forecasting the next COVID-19.

Suboptimal demand forecasting

for semiconductor chips has led to pausing automobile production in the US. On the one hand, automakers struggle to compete for chips against more profitable tech products—e.g., iPhones—on the other hand, US s...
Weighted Voting Delenda Est
by Czynski — 2021-03-01T20:52:27.929Z

Unlike a number of other issues, this one I didn't call in advance, though in retrospect it's, if anything, much more obvious than other things I did call out. Weighted voting on LW, at minimum the ability for it to be visible and preferably the ability for it to affect anything at all except, at most, the number displayed next to a user on their profile page, is a catastrophic failure in progress and must be destroyed.

I've said in the past that

The Hamming problem of group rationality, and possibly the Hamming problem of rationality generally, is how to preserve epistemic rationality under the inherent political pressures existing in a group produces.

It is the Hamming problem because if it isn’t solved, everything else, including all the progress made on individual rationality, is doomed to become utterly worthless. We are not designed to be rational, and this is most harmful in group contexts, where the elephants in our brains take the most control from the riders and we have the least idea of what goals we are actually working towards.

And, closely connected but somewhat separable:

Most things we do are status-motivated, even when we think we have a clear picture of what our motivations are and status is not included in that picture. Our picture of what the truth looks like is fundamentally warped by status in ways that are very hard to fully adjust for.

I also said, particularly for the latter, that "the moderation policies of new LessWrong double down on this". I stand by that, but I missed a bigger issue: the voting system, where higher karma grants a bigger vote, also doubles down on it. Big names are overrepresented on the front page, at the top of the comments section, and everywhere else you can discover new LW content. This was somewhat understandable when LW was working itself out of its doldrums and influential people were making an effort to put good content here, but if that was the driver, it would have gotten less noticeable over time, and instead it has gotten more blatant.

Individuals can opt-out of seeing these votes, but to a first approximation that's useless. Everybody knows that everyone can see the strength of votes, even if that isn't strictly true; social proof is stronger than abstract inference. Social proof is bad, very bad, at best something to be used like someone carrying around two slightly-subcritical uranium masses i...
Kelly *is* (just) about logarithmic utility
by abramdemski — 2021-03-01T20:02:08.300Z

This post is a response to SimonM's post, Kelly isn’t (just) about logarithmic utility. It's an edited and extended version of some of my comments there.

To summarize the whole idea of this post: I'm going to argue that any argument in favor of the Kelly formula has to go through an implication that your utility is logarithmic in money, at some point. If it seems not to, it's either:

mistaken
cleverly hiding the implication
some mind-blowing argument I haven't seen before.

Actually, the post I'm responding to already mentioned one argument in this third category, which I'll mention later. But for the most part I think the point still stands: the best reasons to suppose Kelly is a good heuristic go through arguing logarithmic utility.

The main point of this post is to complain about bad arguments for Kelly -- something which I apparently enjoy doing rather a lot. Take that as an attention-conservation warning.

The rest of this post will consider various arguments in favor of the Kelly criterion (either as a decent rule of thumb, or, as the iron law of investment). Each section considers one argument, with a section title hopefully descriptive of the argument considered.

1: It's About Repeated Bets

This argument goes something like: "If you were to make just one bet, the right thing to do would be to maximize expected value; but for repeated bets, if you bet everything, you'll lose all your money quickly. The Kelly strategy adjusts for this."

A real example of this argument, from the comments:

Kelly maximizes expected geometric growth rate. Therefore over enough bets Kelly maximizes expected, i.e. mean, wealth, not merely median wealth.

This just doesn't work out. Maximizing geometric growth rate is not the same as maximizing mean value. It turns out Kelly favors the first at a severe cost to the second.

Suppose you'd just want to maximize expected money in a single-bet case.

A Bayesian wants to maximize E[u(S⋅x)], where x is your starting money and S is a random variable for the payoff-per-dollar of your strategy. In a two-step scenario, the Bayesian wants to maximize E[u(S1⋅S2⋅x)]. And so on.

If your preferred one-step strategy is one which maximizes expected money, this means u(x)=x for you. But this allows us to push the expectation inwards. Look at the two-step case: E[u(S1⋅S2⋅x)] =...
Grading myself on SSC's 2020 predictions
by knite — 2021-03-01T19:55:18.413Z

Mantic Monday: Judging April COVID Predictions

Judging Our April 2020 Covid-19 Predictions

I privately recorded my own predictions on these questions. I felt uncomfortable posting these publicly at the time. I can't fix that, but I can post my answers now and do better next time.

Score: 3.34

Edit: Per @bucky, I'm pretty sure the scoring rule I used (ln(p) - ln(.5)) is wrong, but I'm not sure what would be the correct rule.
How to end stagnation?
by jasoncrawford — 2021-03-01T19:42:07.721Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/how-to-end-stagnation

When I wrote my post on technological stagnation, the top question I got asked was: So, how do we fix it?

I don’t have the definitive answer, but here’s a starting point. I generally think about the causes of progress on three levels:

Funding. How do research, development, and distribution get funded? This encompasses both for-profit investing and non-profit funding of R&D.
Government. How does the law enable progress, or hamper it? Progress depends on good legal institutions; equally, it can be stifled by bad ones.
Culture. What is the basic philosophical attitude of society towards progress, and the people who pursue it? Is progress seen as possible and desirable?

Correspondingly, my top three hypotheses for technological stagnation are:

The centralization of research funding into a small number of inherently conservative agencies
The growing burden of regulation and bureaucracy
A culture that is increasingly skeptical of or actively hostile to progress

(These are complementary, not mutually exclusive. Incidentally, this is pretty much the same set of factors identified by J. Storrs Hall in Where Is My Flying Car?, which is part of why the book resonated with me so much.)

Inverting these (and changing the order), here are three broad approaches to accelerate progress:

Inspire people to pursue progress

In particular, create a culture that recognizes progress and appreciates it. Some ways to do this:

Tell the story of progress for a popular audience. Enlightenment Now and Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future are two books that do this, and of course it is a lot of what I try to do in these essays.
Publish the facts and data about progress. Our World in Data is the prime source for this today.
Teach the history of progress in schools. I’ve made a start at this with the course Progress Studies for Young Scholars, created in partnership with the Academy of Thought & Industry.
Report on progress fairly and honestly, without muckraking. The Atlantic and WIRED are a few publications that generally do this well; see in particular the work of Derek Thompson.
Write science fiction that envisions amazing inventions and the world they would create. For instance, many inventors and entrepreneurs have been inspired by the “primer” from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age (a sort of educational e-book or tablet based on advanced AI). And countless scientists and engineers

...
Russian x-risks newsletter winter 2020-2021: free vaccines for foreigners, bird flu outbreak, one more nuclear near-miss in the past and one now, new AGI institute.
by avturchin — 2021-03-01T16:35:11.662Z

I got my covid vaccination in December and it easily available in Moscow, especially in malls, where only an ID is required for a jab. Thus, foreigners can be vaccinated, and a Brazilian husband of one Russian girl used this opportunity. However, it is not Pfizer, but the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine. Also, Russian regions are getting much less vaccination, despite Sputnik's export to other countries. Anyway, I had mild side effects like high temperature a day after each of two jabs. Only 4 millions people got at least one shot at the end of February in Russia (for 140 mln population).

Actual morality from covid in Russia could be much higher than it was reported, according to data from additional mortality. Russia could be even a world leader by deaths per million and total deaths.

Meanwhile, bird flu has infected several workers on a farm in Southern Russia, which is the first time for this strain and may be connected with its mutation. There are also reports of wild birds’ die-off in this region.

“Russia's Sberbank will soon open the first non-profit academic institute in Russia where artificial intelligence will be studied, said bank CEO Herman Gref at the AI Journey conference on Thursday… A German scientist based in Switzerland, one of the world's most famous specialists in the field of artificial intelligence, Jürgen Schmidhuber, was invited to become an Honorary Director of Science of the Institute.”

Putin promised serious resources for AI development.

A piece of hardware was stolen from the Russian Doomsday Plane during its renovation, and this is raising questions about nuclear security.

A false alarm was issued on Ramstein military base in Germany after a test launch of 4 Russian ballistic missiles.

Almost 40 years ago, in 1983, the Soviet Union was at trigger-happy state because of NATO drills. Planes were prepared for a preemptive strike using nukes.

Putin spoke about the risks of the end of civilization, because of a global conflict, but nobody cares because the conflict about A. Navalny’s arrest was the main news of the day.
Idea selection
by krbouchard — 2021-03-01T14:07:08.198Z

THE PROBLEMATIC IDEA

In our culture today there is a strong trend of disengagement with the views of people who are accused publicly of being “problematic.” This trend refers mostly to how disagreement manifests on social media, and it has been dubbed cancel culture.

A quote, video, or photograph is given as evidence of the person’s problematic nature, and the groups of people who want this viewpoint eliminated will collectively disengage with both the person and the idea.

This brings to mind a sort of social cleansing wherein both the problematic ideas and the “problematic people” are separated from the rest and refused entry to the discussion. Associating with the problematic person risks being a proponent of their idea, so both the person and the idea are banned as a unit.

The criticism of problematic ideas is often superficial, and ideally this is done as quickly as possible via the ‘shut down.’ This ‘shut down’ is always expressed with violent imagery that evokes images of obliteration beyond repair. Ideas are not discussed; they are ‘destroyed,’ as if a bomb has been dropped on them.

The 'problematic person' has no salvageable ideas or arguments. If they are an artist, their art should not be viewed; if a director, their films not watched. All belonging to them is poisonous and should be placed into a box and hidden away in a dark place, never to be brought out again into the light.

IDEA SELECTION

At play here is a free market element, which is that nobody is owed engagement, just like companies are not entitled to business. The ideas are not openly discussed because that would risk transmitting them. Yet at the same time, they do not trust the free market to effectively weed out ‘problematic’ or ‘weak’ ideas.

Perhaps in defense of cancel culture, the market has never done this well. Just examine the popularity of superstitious beliefs in the Modern world. The market does not naturally select the ideas that are useful, moral, or 'true'. Instead, cancel culture artificially selects which ideas are 'unproblematic' enough to be allowed to evolve and be transmitted. Cancel culture, however, does not do a better job of judging this because of its tendency to 'shut down' and quickly disengage.

This resembles evolutionary artificial selection. Cancel culture is the activity of idea selection by a segment of society. They project into the ...
Fun with +12 OOMs of Compute
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2021-03-01T13:30:13.603Z

Or: Big Timelines Crux Operationalized

What fun things could one build with +12 orders of magnitude of compute? By ‘fun’ I mean ‘powerful.’ This hypothetical is highly relevant to AI timelines, for reasons I’ll explain later.

Summary (Spoilers):

I describe a hypothetical scenario that concretizes the question “what could be built with 2020’s algorithms/ideas/etc. but a trillion times more compute?” Then I give some answers to that question. Then I ask: How likely is it that some sort of TAI would happen in this scenario? This second question is a useful operationalization of the (IMO) most important, most-commonly-discussed timelines crux: “Can we get TAI just by throwing more compute at the problem?” I consider this operationalization to be the main contribution of this post; it directly plugs into Ajeya’s timelines model and is quantitatively more cruxy than anything else I know of. The secondary contribution of this post is my set of answers to the first question: They serve as intuition pumps for my answer to the second, which strongly supports my views on timelines.

The hypothetical

In 2016 the Compute Fairy visits Earth and bestows a blessing: Computers are magically 12 orders of magnitude faster! Over the next five years, what happens? The Deep Learning AI Boom still happens, only much crazier: Instead of making AlphaStar for 10^23 floating point operations, DeepMind makes something for 10^35. Instead of making GPT-3 for 10^23 FLOPs, OpenAI makes something for 10^35. Instead of industry and academia making a cornucopia of things for 10^20 FLOPs or so, they make a cornucopia of things for 10^32 FLOPs or so. When random grad students and hackers spin up neural nets on their laptops, they have a trillion times more compute to work with. [EDIT: Also assume magic +12 OOMs of memory, bandwidth, etc. All the ingredients of compute.]

For context on how big a deal +12 OOMs is, consider the graph below, from ARK. It’s measuring petaflop-days, which are about 10^20 FLOP each. So 10^35 FLOP is 1e+15 on this graph. GPT-3 and AlphaStar are not on this graph, but if they were they would be in the very top-right corner.

Question One: In this hypothetical, what sorts of things could AI projects build?

I encourage you to stop reading, set a five-minute timer, and think about fun things that could be built in this scenario. I’d love it if you wrote up your answers i...
Full-time AGI Safety!
by Steven Byrnes — 2021-03-01T12:42:14.813Z

Hi everyone!

I'm Steve Byrnes, a professional physicist in Boston. Y'all may know me as a regular blogger and commenter on this site. (Example post,

Full list

.)

Well, out of the blue, an exceptionally generous sponsor has granted me a grant to spend the next year full-time trying to advance AGI safety! (Eternal gratitude to Beth Barnes and the

CEA

donor lottery program!)

To make a long story short, my research plan is to immerse myself in the latest thinking about how the human brain works (i.e., what algorithm does it run?), and apply those insights to help move forward the discussion on AGI safety and strategy. (And conversely, to also help move forward the discussion of "What if we succeed?" within neuroscience.)

Until now I've been researching and blogging in little bits of time squeezed between work and kids. Not anymore! Starting today, I'm in full-time, all-out effort mode!

I know that this year is going to fly by far too quickly; I’m desperate to make the most of it. One thing that will help is lots of exchange of ideas! You can email me at

steven.byrnes@gmail.com

if you want to see my research proposal, or discuss topics of interest, or just say hi! :-)