trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The Greedy Doctor Problem... turns out to be relevant to the ELK problem?
by Jan — 2022-01-14T11:58:05.107Z
Link: https://universalprior.substack.com/p/the-greedy-doctor-problem

The following post was published on my Substack and discussed on HackerNews about 2 months ago. I originally planned it as an accessible introduction to Vinge's principle and the Principal-Agent-Problem. Despite having equations and simulations to support my argument, I originally did not think it was sufficiently novel or relevant for the Alignment Forum. However, now that I got a chance to read the new work from ARC on the ELK problem, I think the post might be relevant (or at least thought-provoking) for the community after all. The Greedy Doctor Problem overlaps quite a lot with the ELK problem (just replace the coin flip with the presence of the diamond), and my proposed solutions haven't been brought up before (as far as I can tell). If the community finds this interesting I'm happy to invest the time to map the solution fully onto the ELK problem and to see what comes out.

TL;DR: How to reason about people who are smarter than you. A few proposals, interspersed with reinforcement learning and humorous fiction. Ending on a surprising connection to logical inductors.

What is the Greedy Doctor Problem?

I came up with a neat little thought experiment[1]:

You are very rich and you want to make sure that you stay healthy. But you don't have any medical expertise and, therefore, you want to hire a medical professional to help you monitor your health and diagnose diseases. The medical professional is greedy, i.e. they want to charge you as much money as possible, and they do not (per se) care about your health. They only care about your health as far as they can get money from you. How can you design a payment scheme for the medical professional so that you actually get the ideal treatment?

Over the last few weeks, I've been walking around and bugging people with this question to see what they come up with. Here I want to share some of the things I learned in the process with you, as well as some potential answers. I don't think the question (as presented) is completely well-formed, so the first step to answering it is clarifying the setup and deconfusing the terms. Also, as is typical with thought experiments, I do not have a definitive "solution" and invite you (right now!) to try and come up with something yourself[2].

Some background on the problem

The subtext for the thought experiment is: How should you act when interacting with someone smarter than yourself? ...
Storing own covid saliva for use as a "booster"?
by kuudes — 2022-01-14T08:02:21.202Z

I am considering to freeze my saliva if/when I get omicron, in order to later inject the frozen covid+ saliva into my nose some 6-12 weeks from recovery in order to boost my immunity against covid for longer. What do you people see as ups and downs of this approach?

The main reason for this is that I presume here in Finland they may limit covid vaccine availability after third dose, as both here and for instance in UK some people in medical community have talked that vaccinations after booster should be limited for some reason. If there are further boosters available, those seem clearly preferable over infection.

Rationale is that since your body has recovered from covid, it should have learned how to combat covid with immune system. With reintroducing the same infection I would hope to at least reset the antibody count to slow waning of immunity. Otherwise I have understood antibody count will wane so that you get omicron again in 6-10 months.

I am not a doctor nor a biochemist. I have asked from 2 doctor friends of mine and they saw no large reasons against this, but one of them reminded me that I should not inject the contents but indeed put it in my nose.

My planned procedure is:

Wash hands

Write on ziploc/minigrip bag: BIOHAZARD, COVID+ SALIVA, <name> <date>

Collect saliva into a clean cup

Pour the saliva into the bag

Clean the bag from outside with a napkin

Wash hands

Put the bag inside another similar bag upside down

Wipe the second bag with a napkin

Wash hands

Put the second bag inside third bag again upside down compared to the previous bag

Wipe the third bag with a napkin

Put the bag collection into back of a regular freezer (-18 C)

My plan of disposal of the bags with or without use is to burn them in my fireplace. Alternative plan is to put it into regular trash after first keeping it in direct sunlight for a day.

Main pros and cons I have figured out:

easy to obtain

longer immunity

icky, weird

live virus inoculation seems potentially harmful

So, sanity check time. What do you see as ups and downs in this approach? Go, no go?

Update on 2022-02-23: I have decided against this procedure, because it seems very possible omicron will only offer immunity for 29 days, so doing this could risk an actual reinfection.
2020 Review Article
by Vaniver — 2022-01-14T04:58:02.456Z

A common thing in academia is to write ‘review articles’ that attempt to summarize a whole field quickly, allowing researchers to see what’s out there (while referring them to the actual articles for all of the details). This is my attempt to do something similar for the 2020 Review, focusing on posts that had sufficiently many votes (as all nominated posts was a few too many).

I ended up clustering the posts into seven categories: rationality, gears, economics, history, current events, communication, and alignment.

Rationality

The site doesn't have a tagline anymore, but interest in rationality remains Less Wrong's defining feature.

There were a handful of posts on rationality 'directly'. Anna Salamon looked at two sorts of puzzles:

reality-masking and reality-revealing

, or those which are about controlling yourself (and others) or about understanding non-agentic reality.

Listing out examples

(both internal and external) helped explain cognitive biases more simply. Kaj Sotala

elaborated on the Felt Sense

, a core component of Gendlin’s Focusing. CFAR

released its participant handbook

. Jacob Falkovich wrote about

the treacherous path to rationality

, focusing on various obstacles in the way of developing more rationality.

Personal productivity is a perennial topic on LW. alkjash identified a belief that ‘pain is the unit of effort’, where caring is measured by suffering, and identifies an

alternative, superior view

. Lynette Bye gave

five specific high-variance tips for productivity

, and then later argued prioritization is a huge driver of productivity, and explained

five ways to prioritize better

. AllAmericanBreakfast elaborated on what it means to

give something a Good Try

. adamShimi wrote about

how habits shape identity

. Ben Kuhn repeated Byrne Hobart’s claim that focus drives productivity, and argued that

attention is your scarcest resource

, and then talked about

tools for keeping focused

. alkjash pointed out some ways

success can have downsides

, and how to mitigate those downsides.

orthonormal discussed the

impact of zero points

, and thus the importance of choosing yours. Jacob Falkovich argued

against victim mentality

.

There was some progress on the project of 'slowly digest some maybe-woo things'. Kaj Sotala gives

a non-mystical explanation of “no-self”

, detailing some 'early ...
How to tradeoff utility and agency?
by A Ray — 2022-01-14T01:33:28.803Z

I'm slowly working through a bunch of philosophical criticisms of consequentialism and utilitarianism, kicked off by this book: https://www.routledge.com/Risk-Philosophical-Perspectives/Lewens/p/book/9780415422840 (which I don't think is good enough to actually recommend)

One common thread is complaints about utilitarianism and consequentialism giving incorrect answers in specific cases. One is the topic of this question: When evaluating potential harms, how can we decide between a potential harm that's the result of someone's agency (their own beliefs, decisions, and actions) vs a potential harm from an outside source (e.g. imposed by the state)?

I'm open to gedanken experiments to illustrate this, but for now I'll use something dumb and simple. You can save one of two people; saving them means getting them 100% protection from this specific potential harm, all else being equal.

Person A has entered into a risky position by their own actions, after deciding to do so based on their beliefs. They are currently at a 10% chance of death (with the remainder 90% nothing happens).
Person B has been forced into a risk position by their state, which they were born into and have not been allowed to leave. They are currently at X% chance of death (with the remainder nothing happens).

Assume that Persons A and B have approximately the same utility ahead of the (QALYs, etc). The point of the question is to specifically quantifiably find a ratio to tradeoff between agency and utility (in this case mortality).

For what values of X would you chose to save Person B?

I'm interested in things like natural experiments would would show how current decision systems or philosophies answer this question. I am also interested in peoples personal takes.
I have COVID, for how long should I isolate?
by iceplant — 2022-01-13T20:44:46.005Z

Case was relatively mild, and I'm feeling a lot better now (day 5), though I still have the sniffles and minor fatigue. I tested negative last week and positive this week via PCR, so I'm pretty confident this was COVID and not an unrelated illness. I live in the US, where CDC guidelines now say I can go into public spaces if my symptoms are "resolving" and I wear a mask, though this feels a little permissive given the requirements of other countries. It's unlikely I will be able to get an antigen test result back before day 10. I'm fully vaccinated and boosted with pfizer as of ~3 months ago. I'm having trouble finding high quality research on infectiousness over time. What do you think is a reasonable amount of time to wait (possibly conditional on symptoms) to do the following? None are essential to my basic needs. I will probably do the median of what the community recommends if it seems well supported.

Attend an outdoor event masked where I might be <6ft away from others.
Go to a grocery store masked at off-peak hours
Ride a bus masked
Eat indoors at a crowded restaurant.
Do you want quadratic voting in the Final Voting Phase?
by Raemon — 2022-01-13T20:20:08.688Z

For the 2020 Review, people have continued using the 7-point preliminary voting option throughout the Review Phase. I've personally found it fairly satisfying to use. I'm considering whether to add back the "fine-tuned quadratic voting" option from previous years in the Final Voting Phase.

I currently am mostly happy to leave it as-is (i.e. just use the 7-button voting system the entire time). The extra complexity cost of a separate voting system doesn't seem worth it. But I'm interested in hearing from anyone who wanted to make a strong bid (or, even a weak desire) for a return to the original system.

Some facts about how the current system is playing out:

175 users have voted at all. 112 have cast at least 2 votes. 73 have cast 5+ votes.
The system doesn't let you know how many "points" you've spent, and most users have spent a lot less than their allotted 500 points (which are getting spent 'under the hood')
There are not very many downvotes.

My personal take is:

It's fine for many users to just be voting on a few posts they have an opinion on, rather than "maxing out their ballot."
I feel like when I look at the raw votes, they feel like they capture people actually voting how good they thought each post was, which makes them a more useful signal of how people felt about it (by contrast, last year the votes felt more like an arbitrary sorting signal, at least to me)
If I were starting over, I'd probably only have one "negative" vote option (which I'd set to -4) rather than 3 options.

Not enough people are using the negative options to justify the 3 extra buttons.
Having the "downvote" option be set to -4 (which costs 10 points), also removes the incentive to downvote everything you don't like to -1 (which is often a cheaper way to boost the relative values of posts you do like, but which makes "downvotes" a more confusing signal).

Meanwhile, if I were starting over, I might prefer to have an extra positive option. Right now most of my votes are "4s", but I'd kinda like to be able to signal two gradations of "medium post", and reserve 9s for "actually massively important."
(The previous two ideas probably aren't worth the complexity cost of switching-mid-stream this year, but my current guess is that I should implement them for next year)

Curious what other people think.
Doing "good"
by pchvykov — 2022-01-13T19:52:02.119Z

I just did my first substantial donation (informed by Effective Altruism, and my own work on complex social systems). Even though I have thought before about how and when it is best to donate, the act of actually giving spawned many new insights!

The biggest of these is that no matter how much research you do, and how much quantifiable metrics and statistics you collect, you never get any guarantees that your donation is making the world a better place. The trick is that in a system as complex as our society, any intervention will always send avalanches of consequences rippling through many branches of the system. While the most immediate and obvious effects may seem clearly beneficial, there will always be some secondary or tertiary effects that may be harmful. As it is impossible to account for all such effects, it becomes impossible to reliably quantify the overall benefit of the intervention -- and the more you think about it, the more your head hurts. We all know of the possible contradictory consequences of giving money to a homeless person on the street – but a similar argument could be made with apparently much more clear-cut causes such as sponsoring malaria treatments in Africa. Mosquito nets distributed in very poor regions are sometimes used as fishing nets in ways devastating for the local environment. Giving preventative malaria medicine to children may hinder the natural development of immunity and could thus increase mortality later in their lives.

But these are only the effects we can think of and quantify. When considering long-term and large-scale consequences, causal attribution becomes so challenging that no rigorous research or even logical reasoning is reliable. And so, knowing that the true cumulative impact of a donation is never certain, why did I still choose to donate?

The question seems rich and subtle to me. Are interventions in vastly different cultures we don't fully understand just another form of neo-colonialism? Do acts of kindness in my local community disempower people from learning to care for themselves? It seems that the only certain positive impact of donating, whether it be time or money, is the impact on myself. Making a decision and taking an action in full awareness of uncertainty turns out to be very empowering – a somehow “pure” opportunity to exercise free will. Doing the “right” thing in a conte...
Covid 1/13/22: Endgame
by Zvi — 2022-01-13T18:10:01.278Z

Important note, fleshed out a bit more in Omicron Post #14: From various sources, I have become convinced that rapid tests taken from nose swabs are likely to often be several days slower at detecting infections than rapid tests that use throat swabs.

So if you are testing with the goal of actually learning whether you have Covid or are infectious, that’s what you should do. Otherwise, you’re mostly testing in order to have conducted a test.

Your call.

We’re on the way down in the Northeast – we have the wastewater in Boston, which is already down 50%, we have a clear peak in New York City, and several states are clearly stabilized or better. Within a week, I expect the peak to be hit on average throughout the country.

That doesn’t mean things suddenly end, of course. Assuming no worries about hospitals, the highest value to vigilance actually comes right after the peak, if you think you’ve avoided infection until now. You’ve survived roughly half the risk at that point, making it more reasonable to try and avoid infection entirely, yet risk is still very close to its maximum on a per-day basis.

Yet it is time to start once again making plans for The After Times, which will be with us sooner than it might seem. Right now, the schools are a mess, everything is facing staff shortages and it all feels a little scary, but (death counts and a few hospital conditions aside) this is as bad as it’s going to get, and within a few weeks things will be improving on all fronts.

Executive Summary

If you do a rapid test and want to know the real answer, you need to do a throat swab.
Cases peaking in the Northeast now, rest of country within two weeks.
Schools are a complete disaster, but that’s another entire post.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 6mm cases (+71%) and 9,700 deaths (+10%).

Results: 4.9mm cases (+37%) and 11,856 deaths (+34%).

Prediction for next week: 5.6mm cases (+13%) and 15,000 deaths (+30%).

That’s a clear miss on cases. My presumption is that we were missing more cases than I realized, and for that and/or other reasons we peaked earlier than I expected and a lot of the Northeast is on its way back down shortly. The rest of the country will follow within a few weeks. On net I still expect an increase because I don’t expect big drops in measured cases in the places that have peaked, not quite yet.

On d...
Omicron Post #14
by Zvi — 2022-01-13T18:00:01.077Z

Important note on testing that I’m including at top of both posts today.

From various sources, I have become convinced that rapid tests taken from nose swabs are likely to often be several days slower at detecting infections than rapid tests that use throat swabs.

Here’s Washington Post on that, this quote should tell you what you need to know.

On one side are well-regardedexperts who argue that swabbing your throat in addition to your nose may increase the chances that a home test can detect omicron. On the other side are similarly well-regarded experts, including those at the Food and Drug Administration, who urge Americans to avoid experimenting with kits that were developed and tested using only nasal swabs.

This ‘disagreement’ over ‘experimentation’ made me that much more confident in the conclusion I’d already reached.

That is echoed by a lot of sources both personal and general, including in this heartfelt report of Bob Watcher, whose son has Covid-19 and reports back on the experience, including five days later follow-up where he’s still positive and acts confused about what to do because CDC guidelines are confusing a situation that is otherwise extremely not confusing.

Thus, if you want to know if you have infectious Covid-19, you need to use throat swabs. It’s still not 100% sensitivity or anything, but it’s a lot better, whereas nose swabs are useful but in no way all that reassuring.

If you want to satisfy a testing requirement that is of course another matter. These are very different goals.

This is a whole week’s roundup, because I got an opportunity to impact developments more directly and needed to jump on that with my non-day-job time instead for a few days. I hope to be able to talk about it soon, but can’t right now.

Travel

It’s a very good question. Why the hell are we still doing this?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday advised Americans to avoid travel to Canada, citing “very high” levels of the coronavirus.

Canada was placed under a Level 4 travel health notice — the highest category…“Because of the current situation in Canada, even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading Covid-19 variants,” the C.D.C. said.

The United States has higher rates of Covid-19 than Canada right now, yet we do this thing. I simply can’t take seriously, as someone who might want a physically bet...
On the Impossibility of Interaction with Simulated Agents
by Walkabout — 2022-01-13T17:50:25.987Z

Is it possible to interact with simulated agents?

It is certainly possible from the perspective of the simulator. It could make changes to the state of the simulated environment, and run the simulation rules forward to see what would happen.

It can't be done

But consider the perspective of the simulated. Each simulated agent's experience is the sum of all possible ways that that agent's subjective experience could happen, including all possible ways it could exist in fundamental base reality, and all possible ways it could be simulated.

The total measure of those cases that correspond to the ones in which any particular simulators choose to intervene in the simulation in any particular way is almost certainly so small as to be discountable for any agent with legitimate concerns of its own. It is far more likely, from the agent's perspective, that it will die of a sudden failure of a critical body component, in a way completely consistent with the physical laws it has observed up to that point, than it is that God will appear to it.

But what if I do it anyway?

Suppose, however, that it is God's intention to appear, and He does so, by altering the simulation state appropriately. Consider the subsequent situation from the perspective of the simulated agent.

The agent perceives something in the world that it thinks is a communication from outside the world. It is, once again, a member of the set of all possible ways the agent could be having having the same subjective experience. What measure-fraction of agents who think this are actually in simulations being intervened in in that way? Given that the simulated agents are, like ourselves, sufficiently shoddily constructed, there are a large number of ways an agent could become convinced that it had observed divine intervention that completely accord with the physical laws that have governed the simulation up to that point.

Even supposing the agent is particularly well-built, smart, and rational, and very little of its subjective experience is out of correspondence with its environment, the ways in which verifiably real, highly unlikely phenomena could be genuine signs from God the Simulator need to compete against the ways in which those phenomena could be merely highly unlikely mundane occurrences. Is it more likely that the agent is living in a simulation where someone outside it has elected to perform a miracle, o...