trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Can an economy keep on growing?
by invertedpassion — 2021-03-16T09:55:22.425Z

This is a linkpost from https://invertedpassion.com/can-an-economy-keep-on-growing/

1/ Imagine an economy that keeps on growing indefinitely. It’s essentially a non-zero-sum economy – as the pie becomes bigger, everyone becomes better as even a small percentage of a really large number is substantial.

World GDP over the last two millennia

2/ A capitalistic economy is a fantastic invention – entrepreneurs compete to give consumers more value cheaply. Markets create incentives for innovation, and innovation helps the world become richer as over time more and more human desires are satisfied.

3/ Economic wealth as measured by GDP is nothing but products and services available for purchase. Capitalism suggests these things will be up for purchase because people want them and we can make it. Hence, GDP approximates the total useful stuff available for humans.

4/ An important question to ask is if this process of innovation-led GDP growth can keep going for a long time.

And if it will ultimately come to a halt, how long can it go on?

5/ The answer to this question informs our moral choices and policies because if the economic growth engine stops and we have a fixed pie of useful stuff (i.e. GDP) to go around, the relatively less wealthy will not have any shot at becoming richer.

Under this zero-sum economy scenario, perhaps we should put an upper limit on how much wealth can any single individual claim ownership of.

5/ However, if indefinite economic growth is possible, we will have an ever-expanding pie for everyone.

Under the non-zero sum economy scenario, we should accelerate innovation because a strong case can be made towards the moral obligation for growing an economy because that’s the only way nations escape poverty.

5/ The world economy has grown at ~7.5% per year in the last six decades. This is an exponential growth rate and the math suggests that since 1960 (which incidentally isn’t very long ago – we had landed on the moon by then), our economy has grown 80 times.

6/ In fact, the data shows exactly this. In 1960, the world economy was $1.369 trillion (inflation-adjusted) and today it is $80 trillion.

Today we have 80 times more useful stuff than we had merely six decades ago.

7/ The math of exponential growth is dizzying. At the same growth rate, this means in the next 10 years we will add more (i.e. another $80 trillion) to our economy than the total we have right...
Conversation Exchange Statistics
by lsusr — 2021-03-16T08:50:03.393Z

Conversation Exchange is a website where you can find someone to practice a foreign language with. For example, if you are an American learning Russian then you can make friends a Russian who wants to practice their English.

Last year I sampled the profiles of 20,340 Conversation Exchange users.

Native Speakers

Here is a graph of the top 25 languages on the website as measured by how many native speakers had public[1] Conversation Profiles active in the time period I sampled.

What happens if we control for native speakers' population size by dividing it away?

The top non-English languages per capita are the European languages French, Italian and Hungarian, followed by Japanese and Korean. Mandarin, Portuguese and Hindi drop to the bottom due to their gigantic populations and relative isolation from the English-speaking world.

English Speakers' Target Languages

The most important language in the world to know is English. Almost[2] all Conversation Exchange users who don't speak English natively have English as their target language to learn.

What do English speakers want to learn?

Spanish is at the top because if you look at a map then the English-speaking world borders more Spanish speakers than speakers of any other language. Japanese, French, Korean and Italian are near the top because they carry cultural cachet in the English-speaking world.

Cultural Connection

Generally-speaking, if a language has strong ties to the English-speaking world then lots of English speakers want to learn the language and lots of native speakers join Conversation Exchange to improve their English. Spanish and Chinese are weirdly asymmetric.

Chinese: Conversation Exchange could be too intimidating to use. The Chinese-speaking Internet is isolated from the rest of the Internet by culture, language and the Great Firewall. Basically every Chinese-speaking person I have encountered on Conversation Exchange is either highly educated or works in the export industry. The result is asymmetry, with disproportionately more English speakers seeking go learn Chinese than Chinese speakers seeking to learn English.

Spanish: At the time of writing this, my hypothesis was that lots of English speakers (mostly Norteamericanos) want to learn Spanish so they can talk to Hispanics and Mexicans. There is a gigantic Spanish-speaking population living in South America. My hypothesis was the Hispanics and

...
Bay and/or Global Solstice* Job Search (2021 - 2022)
by Raemon — 2021-03-16T00:21:10.290Z

tl;dr: Would you like to lead:

SF/Bay Summer Solstice
SF/Bay Winter Solstice
A global online Winter Solstice?

If so, please apply here.

People who have previously organized Solstice are encouraged to apply. We're ideally looking for two co-organizers, one more experienced and an "apprentice."

The 2020 Bay winter solstice team is now looking for people to pass the torch to, to organize the 2021 winter solstice. It so happens that Summer Solstice is also around the corner, and it seemed good to put out a general call for anyone interested in running either a summer-or-winter solstice event. We're unsure how the pandemic will play out in the meantime, but it seemed important to start planning now.

Whether you’ve never run a Solstice before, or whether you’re a veteran organizer, we encourage you to apply to run this year's event.

Moreover, if you're not sure you want to run a solstice this year, but might want to run next year's event, you should also apply. (I think it's useful to build up a pool of potential solstice organizers on a multi-year timescale, so it's easier to find people who'd work well together, and build up some shared cultural knowledge of what goes into solstice-organizing)

Last Year's Winter Solstice

Last year, the Winter Solstice team ended up running an online, global event. This wasn’t a full replacement for singing together in-person, but it went surprisingly well. We built custom singalong software, which (mostly) worked. Some people have said it was the most impactful Solstice had been for them in years. Others mentioned that they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to attend a Solstice, and appreciated the online format.

The solstice celebration is widely regarded as one of the most valuable and meaningful of community events. But each year only a few people apply to run the next Bay Solstice - almost exactly enough to keep it afloat. So if you're hesitant, or on the fence, or if you'd like to be an organizer but don't think you're strong enough yet -- still reach out to us! We have a lot of resources and experience from all the previous years, and we can give you guidance throughout the year. And in recent years, solstice has been experimenting with having a team of organizers, rather than a single person, to ease the burden of work (which has increased as solstice has grown).

By being a solstice organizer, you'll be helping t...
What's So Bad About Ad-Hoc Mathematical Definitions?
by johnswentworth — 2021-03-15T21:51:53.242Z

Suppose it’s the early twentieth century, and we’re trying to quantify the concept of “information”. Specifically, we want to measure “how much information” one variable contains about another - for instance, how much information a noisy measurement of the temperature of an engine contains about the actual engine temperature.

Along comes

Karl Pearson

, and suggests using his “correlation coefficient” (specifically the square of the correlation coefficient, ρ(X,Y)2). As a measure of information, this has some sensible properties:

If there’s no information, then ρ(X,Y)2 is zero.
If ρ(X,Y)2 is one, then there’s perfect information - one variable tells us everything there is to know about the other.
It’s symmetric: the amount of information which X tells us about Y equals the amount of information which Y tells us about X.

As an added bonus, it’s mathematically simple to calculate, estimate, and manipulate. Sure, it’s not very “principled”, but it seems like a good-enough measure to work with.

Karl Pearson. He'd make a solid movie villain; I get sort of a Tywin Lannister vibe.

Now an engineer from Bell Telephone shows up with a real-world problem: they’ve been contracted to create secure communications for the military. They want to ensure that externally-visible data Y contains no information about secret message X, so they need a way to measure “how much information” one variable contains about another. What a perfect use-case! We advise them to design their system so that X and Y have zero correlation.

A few years later, Bell Telephone gets a visit from a very unhappy colonel. Apparently the enemy has been reading their messages. Zero correlation was not enough to keep the secret messages secret.

Now, Bell could patch over this problem. For instance, they could pick a bunch of functions like X2, sin(Y), eX+2X−1, etc, and require that those also be uncorrelated. With enough functions, and a wide enough variety, that might be enough… but it’s going to get very complicated very quickly, with all these new design constraints piling up.

Fortunately, off in a corner of Bell Labs, one of their researchers already has an alternative solution. Claude Shannon suggests quantifying “how much information” X contains about Y using his “mutual information” metric I(X;Y). This has a bunch of sensible properties, but the main argument is that...
Wild Reading
by DirectedEvolution — 2021-03-15T21:34:41.177Z

When I was in therapy a few years ago, my therapist introduced me to a technique she called Wild Mind. The idea is simple: just let yourself do what you want from moment to moment. Follow your impulses. If you feel like cleaning, start cleaning. If, halfway through, you get peckish, eat whatever food occurs to you to eat. Take a walk while you're eating that apple, and if you want, stop and look at the scenery when you notice something striking.

Wild Reading introduces one constraint. Follow your impulses, but while staring at the text you need to read. If you have a dense textbook, perhaps you'll idly flip through the pages. Maybe you'll glance at the headers, or skim a sentence or two here and there. Stare at the figures. Count the paragraphs. Maybe you'll find yourself drawn in to read the sentences themselves occasionally. Whatever you do, follow your impulses, no matter how shallow or lazy they seem, as long as you're staring at the text while you're doing it.

I'm just starting to experiment with it, and I like it. But I see this as a hypothesis, one that might be worth experimenting with for several hours on a single text to see how it works for you?
Nitric Oxide Spray... a cure for COVID19??
by Shmi — 2021-03-15T19:36:17.054Z

According to https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/uk-clinical-trial-confirms-sanotize-s-breakthrough-treatment-for-covid-19/

Patients with a self-administered nasal spray application found to have reduced SARS-CoV-2 log viral load by more than 95% in infected participants within 24 hours of treatment, and by more than 99% in 72 hours.

Update: the link to the company's site: https://sanotize.com/covid-19/

This sounds too good to be true, but says it's been RCT'd. What are the odds that by using a nasal spray for 3 days once you get positive test results, or even once you have symptoms would protect you from complications?
Anyone been through IFS or coherence therapy?
by warrenjordan — 2021-03-15T18:35:15.233Z

Would like to hear some anecdotes, field reports, personal experiences going through IFS and/or coherence therapy. I've been going to therapy for almost a year and thought these specializations would benefit me the most.

It'd also be interesting to hear from folks who have also done self-therapy and therapy with an IFS or coherence specialist.
Return to New York City
by Zvi — 2021-03-15T15:20:00.667Z

This past week, I had my first opportunity in a year to visit New York City, to get my vaccine shot, to look at potential apartments and also to finally visit the city. This is my report of the trip.

I Love New York

This city is my home, and I will fight to defend it. It is the best place.

In particular, downtown Manhattan, the area between Spring Street and 23rd Street, is my home. The Upper West Side is where I grew up, and it has its advantages, but it isn’t quite home. It’s a different kind of home, but I’d still feel like I was going home when I got in the subway in the morning to go downtown, rather than feeling like I was going home in the evening when I returned to the apartment.

There is nothing like being at the center of the world, within walking distance of all the things, everything at your fingertips. Simply being there brought tears to my eyes.

We took the car down to a place on Lafayette and 7th Street. Amazing location. I met the man checking me in, and climbed four flights of stairs to the penthouse. It opened to a gorgeous artist’s penthouse, which would have been a great place to stay except for the parts where it was up four flights of stairs, it was a studio that had been advertised as a one bedroom, the hot water wasn’t that hot even after giving it ten minutes, the kitchen was so tiny the refrigerator was a tiny extra unit in the main room and the rest of the kitchen was mostly non-functional, and the chairs at the dining table were so uncomfortable for my back I can only assume that discomfort was the design goal. There was a homeless man sleeping in the doorway, and that led to the installing of a second downstairs door that prevented anyone from being able to buzz in if it was actually locked, which was presumably why it usually wasn’t and the homeless man still got to sleep downstairs anyway.

None of that mattered. I was home. I put on Welcome to New York and New York, New York and My Way and the other New York, New York and New York City and King of New York and New York State of Mind and danced, because f*** subtlety. Later I’d put on my playlist of favorite songs on my headphones and walk around the neighborhood, every song about the city and its joy. A hell of a town.

Vaccination Station

The big moment of the trip was when I went to get my first shot of that sweet, sweet Pfizer vaccine. I had a 9:15am appointment...
Feedback calibration
by cousin_it — 2021-03-15T14:24:44.244Z

I got this idea from our music-makers chat.

Imagine you record a song and your friends say it's "nice". What does that mean? Is it really nice? One way to solve the problem is to see what feedback your friends give to songs recorded by your other friends. For example, Bob shares some violin playing that is obviously (to you) off key. Carol says "it's nice, but the intonation on some notes could be a bit improved". By integrating a bunch of evidence like this, you can learn two things: 1) how to correctly interpret feedback given to you, instead of taking words like "nice" at face value 2) how to give feedback to other people, without seeming either too blunt or too diplomatic.

The same idea applies to many things besides music. We can call it "feedback calibration". I'm pretty sure it isn't new, many people do it intuitively anyway. But maybe seeing it spelled out will be useful to someone.
AstraZeneca COVID Vaccine and blood clots
by jmh — 2021-03-15T13:16:24.878Z

Any thoughts on the reality of the new reports about the potential that the vaccine exposes receivers to a risk of blood clot problems?

I did a quick Google Scholar search but nothing seemed to apply just looking at the title listing in the summary page. The stories I've seen reported in the press seem weak on any actual details about how that vaccine might produce the problem while it seems unheard of with the other vaccines. Incident rates seem really small so it makes me wonder. Are we really getting the real story here or is this a case of some chicken little worries about the sky falling?

I also wonder, given a prior post on the correlation implying some causality, if that thought should not shift one's views towards not really getting the whole story. If so, just what "the story" might actually be.
Clubhouse
by lsusr — 2021-03-15T03:38:24.550Z

A friend showed me Clubhouse on her iPhone eleven days ago on March 3, 2021. It was the first time I had heard about the app. Five minutes with the app was enough to convince me it was positioned to become the next big media platform.

That same evening I borrowed the same friend's tertiary iPhone so I could use the app myself. (I run Android.) Over the next few days I invited two real world friends to collaborate on establishing a Clubhouse show. My friends were skeptical but open-minded. I convinced both of them Clubhouse was worth a bet.

This post has three parts.

In Context I tell stories which inform my evaluation of Clubhouse.

In Current State I explain what Clubhouse is and how it works.

In Betting on a Future I explain what I plan to do with my prediction.

Context

Conversation-style Podcasts

One of the most popular podcasts is the world is The Joe Rogan Experience. The 53-year-old former mixed martial artist's episodes regularly exceed three hours. The podcast's logo features a scary-looking man with a crazed grin and an eye on his forehead.

Many podcasts are interviews. Joe Rogan's interviews is exceptionally popular because they sound like real conversations. If your podcast is limited to one hour per episode then you can never get more than one hour deep into a topic. Podcasts interviewing authors are often just the author pitching his or her book. They don't have time for anything more. Listening to the same author on different podcasts is redundant…unless one of those podcasts is The Joe Rogan Experience.

Another exceptionally popular podcast is Trash Taste. Trash Taste is three anime YouTubers sitting around a table talking about whatever they feel like. Trash Taste frequently (but not always) invites guests onto the channel. Trash Taste is popular because it feels like hanging out with Joey, Connor and Garnt.

There is listener demand for informal unscripted conversation.

Guest Speaking for Middle Schools

Over the last few months I was a guest speaker at middle schools where I gave presentations on science, entrepreneurship and design. We used Zoom. We started with a presentation where I explained who I was. The bulk of the time was spent in Q&A. Students raised their hands. The teacher selected one student to speak at a time. The student asked a question and I answered it. Sometimes we had a short back-and-forth.

The introduction was nonintera...
Impact of the rationalist community who someone who aspired to be "rational"
by Arthur Milchior — 2021-03-15T02:54:55.735Z

This is cross posted from my blog and originally intended to people who are not familiar with the rationalist community, or who may have heard about it from external source. If you regularly read this site, the interest may be limited. However, I myself would be interested to read the take of my friends about this question.

For years, I wanted to write about what the aspiring rationalist community meant to me. Seeing a lot of people criticizing it, sometime with argument I agree with, often with ones which does not represents the reality I've seen, I made a twitter thread about it. Threads are helpful because I find it more acceptable to write whatever comes through my mind randomly, which makes it easier to write than a blog post. I'll translate and post it here too.

The thread

What do I call "Rationalism"

I fear it might be necessary to state that I do not necessarily agree with everything aspiring rationalist wrote. I am far from having read everything. I'll add that this term seems to be used by various unrelated communities. I have sometime seen people stating "I use rationalist reasoning, so I'm right". I have not seen it in the circles I've been in and can not imagine it ever occurring.

I honestly don't know which ideas originally comes from the rationalist movement, which of those ideas are now known outside of it, what ideas were already very well known, classical, and straighforward for most people. There are of course a few exceptions, such as the paper-clip maximiser, the word of Em, many IA-risk related ideas, but I've never been able to understand why this very idea is so important, so I'm not going to consider it here.

I do love rational(ist)[1] fiction. Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality being the best known, Metropolitan Man, Instrument of Destructions, Sword of Good, I'm beginning Pokemon: the origin of species[2]... Simply, I consider it to be a genre of fiction. Not better than romance, polars, or genre fiction. It emphasizes a notion I really love, considering as true an idea, and trying to figure the consequences, however surprising they may be. It seems Science-Fiction did this a lot, but now that SF became Star Wars, 2001, A space Oddissey, is not what I'm looking for anymore. Maybe the tag "rationalist" let me find what I'd have loved as SF decades ago.

Some concepts

Let's come back to non-fiction, blog post, the "sequences", et...
Against neutrality about creating happy lives
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-03-15T01:55:27.568Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

(Warning: spoilers for the movie American Beauty.)

“Once for each, just once. Once and no more.
And for us too, once. Never again. And yet
it seems that this—to have once existed,
even if only once, to have been a part
of this earth—can never be taken back.

And so we keep going, trying to achieve it,
trying to hold it in our simple hands,
our already crowded eyes, our dumbfounded hearts.”

– Rilke, Ninth Elegy

Various philosophers have tried hard to validate the so-called “intuition of neutrality,” according to which the fact that someone would live a wonderful life, if created, is not itself reason to create them (see e.g. Frick (2014) for efforts in this vicinity). The oft-quoted slogan from Jan Narveson is: “We are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people” (p. 80).

I don’t have the neutrality intuition. To the contrary, I think that creating someone who will live a wonderful life is to do, for them, something incredibly significant and worthwhile. Exactly how to weigh this against other considerations in different contexts is an additional and substantially more complex question. But I feel very far from neutral about it, and I’d hope that others, in considering whether to create me, wouldn’t feel neutral, either. This post tries to point at why.

I. Preciousness

“Earth, loved one,
I will. Believe me, you don’t need any more
of your springtimes to win me: one
is already more than my blood can take.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been yours
completely.”

– Rilke, Ninth Elegy

My central objection to the neutrality intuition stems from a kind of love I feel towards life and the world. When I think about everything that I have seen and been and done in my life — about friends, family, partners, dogs, cities, cliffs, dances, silences, oceans, temples, reeds in the snow, flags in the wind, music twisting into the sky, a curb I used to sit on with my friends after school — the chance to have been alive in this way, amidst such beauty and strangeness and wonder, seems to me incredibly precious. If I learned that I was about to die, it is to this preciousness that my mind would turn.

Here I think of the final scene (warning: spoilers, violence) of American Beauty, narrated by a character who has just been shot:

“I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second befor

...