trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Nassim Taleb on Election Forecasting
by NatashaRostova — 2016-11-26T19:06:05.308Z

Nassim Taleb recently posted this mathematical draft of election forecasting refinement to his Twitter.

The math isn’t super important to see why it’s so cool. His model seems to be that we should try to forecast the election outcome, including uncertainty between now and the end date, rather than build a forecast that takes current poll numbers and implicitly assumes nothing changes.

The mechanism of his model focuses on forming an unbiased time-series, formulated using stochastic methods. The mainstream methods as of now focus on multi-level Bayesian methods that look to see how the election would turn out if it were run today.

That seems like it makes more sense. While it’s safe to assume a candidate will always want to have the highest chances of winning, the process by which two candidates interact is highly dynamic and strategic with respect to the election date.

When you stop to think about it, it’s actually remarkable that elections are so incredibly close to 50-50, with a 3-5% victory being generally immense. It captures this underlying dynamic of political game theory.

(At the more local level this isn’t always true, due to issues such as incumbent advantage, local party domination, strategic funding choices, and various other issues. The point though is that when those frictions are ameliorated due to the importance of the presidency, we find ourselves in a scenario where the equilibrium tends to be elections very close to 50-50.)

So back to the mechanism of the model, Taleb imposes a no-arbitrage condition (borrowed from options pricing) to impose time-varying consistency on the Brier score. This is a similar concept to financial options, where you can go bankrupt or make money even before the final event. In Taleb's world, if a guy like Nate Silver is creating forecasts that are varying largely over time prior to the election, this suggests he hasn't put any time dynamic constraints on his model.

The math is based on assumptions though that with high uncertainty, far out from the election, the best forecast is 50-50. This set of assumptions would have to be empirically tested. Still, stepping aside from the math, it does feel intuitive that an election forecast with high variation a year away from the event is not worth relying on, that sticking closer to 50-50 would offer a better full-sample Brier

...
Seeking better name for "Effective Egoism"
by DataPacRat — 2016-11-25T22:31:49.311Z

Aka, coming up with a better term for applying LW-style rationality techniques to 'rational self-interest'.
Aka, in parallel with the current movement of 'Effective Altruism', which seeks the best available ways to fulfill one's values, when those values focus roughly on improving the well-being and reducing the suffering of people in general, seeking the best available ways to fulfill one's values, when those values focus roughly on improving the well-being and reducing the suffering of oneself.
(I find that I may have use for this term both in reality and in my NaNoWriMo attempt.)
Revealed and Stated Identity
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2016-11-25T20:17:24.845Z
Link: https://mapandterritory.org/revealed-and-stated-identity-64c6ec070f4f

In modern America, many people think of their identity as a thing they own. If I say I’m a Brony, have a non-binary gender, or identify as transracial, then that’s it, and so much the worse for you if you perceive me as otherwise. This is an empowering idea that lets people escape the confines others may try to put on them and seems to make people happier than being forced into identities they don’t want. But it comes at the cost of ignoring the reality that you are not in full control of your identity.

Much of what we might call identity is decided by others even if we don’t like it. I don’t get to decide if you think I’m tall or short: you’re going to look at me and categorize my height. I might want you to think of me in a particular way, but you have to make your own determination about me, and all I can do is present information via various channels to try to influence your decision. Eminem gets at this tension when he raps

And I am, whatever you say I am
If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?
In the papers, the news, everyday I am
Radio won’t even play my jam
’Cause I am, whatever you say I am
If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?
In the papers, the news, everyday I am
I don’t know it’s just the way I am

So it seems we have a problem. People want to be able to choose how others think of them, yet wanting a particular identity is not enough to get it. Identity can become confusing and frustrating in cases where, say, I think of myself as kind but others don’t see me that way. How do I deal with this conflict? Do I know the essential me better than others? And if so, why don’t they see it? And if they see the “real” me, what does that mean about the value of my self-perceptions? Can I be something even if no one thinks I am, and if not does that mean I never really had the right to choose my identity?

Rather than trap ourselves in that quagmire, I think we can borrow a concept from economics to approach a better understanding of the conflicts in understanding identity.

Early in the 20th century, economists noticed that sometimes people said they wanted one thing, like cake, but then bought ice cream instead. Rather than accept that sometimes people do mixed up things, Paul Samuelson developed a theory of revealed preferences to help make sense of...
Meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-11-25T18:53:22.701Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
27 November 2016 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg Room 456, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

Meeting is on 4th floor of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building. Permit parking designations do not apply on weekends, so park pretty much wherever you want.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
Weekly LW Meetups
by FrankAdamek — 2016-11-25T16:56:30.680Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on November 25th. The following week's summary is here.

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

[Amsterdam] Meetup #7 - Becoming Less Wrong: 27 November 2016 03:13PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Bay Area Winter Solstice 2016: 17 December 2016 07:00PM
[Moscow] Games in Kocherga club: FallacyMania, Tower of Chaos, Training Game Party: 30 November 2016 07:40PM
Moscow social meetup: Party games!: 04 December 2016 02:00PM
NY Solstice 2016 - The Story of Smallpox: 17 December 2016 06:00PM
Seattle Secular Solstice: 10 December 2016 04:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - December 2016: 04 December 2016 04:00PM
Vienna Meetup: 26 November 2016 03:00PM
Rationality Vienna Meetup: 17 December 2016 03:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Canberra, Columbus, Denver, Kraków, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, New Hampshire, New York, Philadelphia, Prague, Research Triangle NC, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers and a Slack channel for daily discussion and online meetups on Sunday night US time.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. These are an attempt to collect information on all the meetups happening in upcoming weeks. The best way to get your meetup featured is still to use the Add New Meetup feature, but you'll also have the benefit of having your meetup mentioned in a weekly overview. These overview posts are moved to the discussion section when the new post goes up.

Please note that for your meetup to appear in the weekly meetups feature, you need to post your meetup before the Friday before your meetup!

If you check Less Wrong irregularly, consider subscribing to one or more city-specific mailing list in order to be no...
Industry Matters 2: Partial Retraction
by sarahconstantin — 2016-11-23T17:08:15.551Z

Epistemic status: still tentative

Some useful comments on the last post on manufacturing have convinced me of some weaknesses in my argument.

First of all, I think I was wrong that most manufacturing job loss is due to trade. There are several economic analyses, using different methods, that come to the conclusion that a minority of manufacturing jobs are lost to trade, with most of the remainder lost to labor productivity increases.

Second of all, I want to refine my argument about productivity.

Labor productivity and multifactor productivity in manufacturing, as well as output, have grown steadily throughout the 20th century, and continue to grow today. The claim “we are making more things than ever before in America” is true.

It’s also true that manufacturing employment has dropped slowly through the 70’s and 80’s until today. This is plausibly due to improvements in labor productivity.

However, the striking, very rapid decline of manufacturing employment post-2000, in which half of all manufacturing jobs were lost in fifteen years, looks like a different phenomenon. And it does correspond temporally to a drop in output and productivity growth. It also corresponds temporally to the establishment of normal trade relations with China, and there is more detailed evidence that there’s a causal link between job loss and competition with China.

My current belief is that the long-term secular decline in manufacturing employment is probably just due to the standard phenomenon where better efficiency leads to employing fewer workers in a field, the same reason that there are fewer farmers than there used to be.

However, something weird seems to have happened in 2000, something that hurt productivity. It might be trade. It might be some kind of “stickiness” effect where external shocks are hard to recover from, because there’s a lot of interdependence in industry, and if you lose one firm you might lose the whole ecosystem. It might be some completely different thing. But I believe that there is a post-2000 phenomenon which is not adequately explained by just “higher productivity causes job loss.”

Most manufacturing job loss is due to productivity; only a minority is due to trade

David Autor‘s economic analysis concluded...
Climbing the Horseshoe
by Jacob Falkovich — 2016-11-23T02:54:49.000Z

Exposition (plus an example exculpating exports)

Trump won the election, and people are blaming polarization. WSJ – Trump benefited from polarization, Global Research – polarization made Trump unavoidable, Reason – Trump won because of the PC culture war, Guardian – Did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?, Road and Track – polarized glasses don’t work with LCD screens. That last article makes a great point. The other ones miss it.

Trump most dangerous failing is that he sees every human interaction as a zero sum game, a contest with winners and losers. Trump has made a lot of his money by exploiting others, his gains were someone else’s loss. He operates as if he can’t imagine things being any other way. And yet: our society and our economy are based on cooperation and dealings with mutual benefit. As long as spiteful deities don’t interfere, every time humans have tried cooperating with each on larger scales the results have been overwhelmingly positive.

Case in point: American trade with China is perhaps the greatest win-win game in human history by the pure number of winners. It helped lift 600 million Chinese out of poverty, reduced the risk of World War III, and saved American consumers hundreds of billions of dollars which they redirected to create American jobs in retail and in services. It also cost about 2 million American jobs in manufacturing. Bottom line: 1,000 million winners and 2 million losers. That’s a 99.8% win rate.

Smarter redistribution within the US could have made it a 100% win-win by helping those who were affected negatively, but polarized American politics prevent smart redistribution from happening. International trade can create winners and losers within a country, but it’s always a win-win for each country on aggregate. It makes no sense to talk about “beating someone” in trade, the same way you don’t “beat someone” at dating.

Of course, making sense is never high on Trump’s priority list:

We don’t win anymore. We don’t beat China in trade. […] I beat China all the time. All the time.

But this isn’t an essay about trade (so save your nitpicking about labor market theories). And this isn’t an essay about Trump (although he shall again prove unavoidable). This is an essay about cooperation ...
Mismatched Vocabularies
by Error — 2016-11-21T17:55:20.400Z

Sometimes I'll be speaking to someone and use an obscure word or concept they're unfamiliar with. There's a few different reactions, and, well, I understand mine and do not understand the ones that are not mine. I spent five minutes thinking about it, trying to model why people are crazy and the world is mad, and came up with these more-common reactions and my hypotheses:

Google the unknown reference, get the definition or wikipedia summary, then respond ("understanding is necessary to communication and now I've learned something new").

Ignore it and carry on the conversation as best possible anyway ("doesn't matter what it meant, I'm just here for the social contact").

Get angry at the ostentatious erudition ("you have just made an implied status grab and I'm slapping you down").

If it's not obvious, #1 is my knee-jerk reaction to unknown references; #2 seems to be the way most people deal with it; and I have a lot of difficulty dealing with #3 even remotely charitabl--STOP.

No.

I don't get to use a verbal justification of #1 and compare it to an evopsych historical-cause of #3. That's a type error, or something, and also hypocrisy: by making the comparison, I'm setting myself above those poor adaptation-executing sheep, i.e. I'm doing exactly what (I think) they're getting angry at me about. Despite my uncharitable framing, their implied complaint is absolutely correct!

This bothers me, and I suddenly don't trust my own perspective, so I'm farming it out: what's really going on here? What do #2 and #3 feel like from the inside, and what's the symmetric explanation of #1?
Meetup : Meetup #7 - Becoming Less Wrong
by  — 2016-11-21T16:50:21.143Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #7 - Becoming Less Wrong

WHEN:
27 November 2016 03:13:37PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Meester Treublaan 18, 1097 DP Amsterdam, Netherlands

We actually didn't get around to our LessWrong discussion last time, so lets try again on Sunday the 27th!

To recap: we want to try discussing some Less Wrong blog posts. Two of the three below are selected from the 'How to actually change your mind' sequence. Changing your mind in view of new evidence is thé core skill of epistemic rationality. If there's one thing cognitive research has taught us, it's that we're rightfully calling it a skill: it's hard, it has to be practiced, and it's important.

The first one tackles the misconception that rationality and emotions are opposites. Toon will also elaborate on this briefly during the meeting.

On rationality and emotions: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hp/feeling_rational/

On completing patterns: http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/
On rationalisation: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ju/rationalization/

In addition, everyone is encouraged to read around if they feel like it!

See you on Sunday!

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup #7 - Becoming Less Wrong
Open thread, Nov. 21 - Nov. 27 - 2016
by MrMind — 2016-11-21T07:47:53.213Z

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.
Sample means, how do they work?
by Benquo — 2016-11-20T21:04:54.972Z

You know how people make public health decisions about food fortification, and medical decisions about taking supplements, based on things like the Recommended Daily Allowance? Well, there's an article in Nutrients titled A Statistical Error in the Estimation of the Recommended Dietary Allowance for Vitamin D. This paper says the following about the info used to establish the US recommended daily allowance for vitamin D:

The correct interpretation of the lower prediction limit is that 97.5% of study averages are predicted to have values exceeding this limit. This is essentially different from the IOM’s conclusion that 97.5% of individuals will have values exceeding the lower prediction limit.

The whole point of looking at averages is that individuals vary a lot due to a bunch of random stuff, but if you take an average of a lot of individuals, that cancels out most of the noise, so the average varies hardly at all. How much variation there is from individual to individual determines the population variance. How much variation you'd expect in your average due to statistical noise from sample to sample determines what we call the variation of the sample mean.

When you look at frequentist statistical confidence intervals, they are generally expressing how big the ordinary range of variation is for your average. For instance, 90% of the time, your average will not be farther off from the "true" average than it is from the boundaries of your confidence interval. This is relevant for answering questions like, "does this trend look a lot bigger than you'd expect from random chance?" The whole point of looking at large samples is that the errors have a chance to cancel out, leading to a very small random variation in the mean, relative to the variation in the population. This allows us to be confident that even fairly small differences in the mean are unlikely to be due to random noise.

The error here, was taking the statistical properties of the mean, and assuming that they applied to the population. In particular, the IOM looked at the dose-response curve for vitamin D, and came up with a distribution for the average response to vitamin D dosage. Based on their data, if you did another study like theirs on new data, it ought to predict that 600 IU of vitamin D is enough for the average person 97.5% of the time.

They concluded from this that 97.5% of peop

...
EMdrive paper published, nearly identical to leaked draft.
by morganism — 2016-11-19T21:30:54.440Z

Paper first, article next

http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.B36120

http://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-nasa-s-peer-reviewed-em-drive-paper-has-finally-been-published

TLDR,

Yup, thrust estimates the same 1.2 millinewtons per kw, in vac.

Hypothesized to be pushing off the quantum foam.

"[The] supporting physics model used to derive a force based on operating conditions in the test article can be categorised as a nonlocal hidden-variable theory, or pilot-wave theory for short."

Pilot-wave theory is a slightly controversial interpretation of quantum mechanics.

It's pretty complicated stuff, but basically the currently accepted Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics states that particles do not have defined locations until they are observed.

Pilot-wave theory, on the other hand, suggests that particles do have precise positions at all times, but in order for this to be the case, the world must also be strange in other ways – which is why many physicists have dismissed the idea.

But in recent years, the pilot-wave theory has been increasing in popularity, and the NASA team suggests that it could help explain how the EM Drive produces thrust without appearing to propel anything in the other direction.

"If a medium is capable of supporting acoustic oscillations, this means that the internal constituents were capable of interacting and exchanging momentum," the team writes.

Pilot wave theory

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160517-pilot-wave-theory-gains-experimental-support/
Meetup : Seattle Secular Solstice
by agilecaveman — 2016-11-18T22:00:20.893Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Secular Solstice

WHEN:
10 December 2016 04:00:00PM (-0800)

WHERE:
114 Alaskan Way S, Seattle, Washington 98104

A night to gather and celebrate humanity, warmth, knowledge and progress, the solstice is an annual tradition full of songs, stories, laughter, light and beauty. This is an opportunity for Seattlites to come together for an experience that makes us feel more connected to community, our world, and what it means to be alive.

The beginning activities will be focused on fun and celebration, getting to know each other and playing games. The rest of the evening follow the arc of the solstice itself - thematically moving from light to dark to light again. It will begin with bright and festive energy while we focus on the ingenuity that allowed humanity to turn the winter from a season historically known for fear and deprivation and into a time of promise, plenty and warmth.

See Facebook event for more details:

https://www.facebook.com/events/887737281326963/

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Secular Solstice
Meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup
by iarwain1 — 2016-11-18T17:30:10.617Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup

WHEN:
20 November 2016 08:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE:
Performing Arts and Humanities Bldg Room 456, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore, MD 21250

Meeting is on 4th floor of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building. Permit parking designations do not apply on weekends, so park pretty much wherever you want.

Discussion article for the meetup : Baltimore Area / UMBC Weekly Meetup