trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Pragmatism and Completeness
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2020-06-12T16:34:57.691Z

Philosophers often get a bad wrap, not entirely without justification. The common complaint is something like "come on, do we really need to analyze this thing in so much detail? Can't we just get on with life since the world keeps working whether we understand it or not?"

Without digging too deep into all the reasons why some people like philosophy and others don't, I want to use this opening example to talk about two purposes that often cross: pragmatism and completeness.

When our purpose is pragmatism, we care about getting something else done. That is, pragmatism doesn't exist on its own, it's in the service of another purpose. If I'm hungry, perhaps all I care about is eating, not the details of digestion or food preparation. I can be pragmatic about eating and be content with my understanding that if I eat a sandwich my hunger goes away.

The purpose of completeness can stand on its own. It can manifest as a desire to know everything and be capable of doing anything. We need not be about something to engage in completeness; we can engage with completeness itself and let it lead us to the places where our understanding or abilities are not yet complete. It creates a kind of unbounded curiosity to know more that can only be satisfied by total understanding of everything.

In the imaginary space of understanding, pragmatism and completeness act like dimensions along which our desire for understanding can reside. We might seek highly pragmatic understanding that is so incomplete it's opaque, we might desire completeness even at the cost of being pragmatic enough for our knowledge to be useful, and more often we find some path between them that balances our need to use knowledge with our desire to build it.

To return to philosophy, pragmatism and completeness show up as cross purposes both within philosophy and in the meta question about how useful philosophy is.

For any philosophical question, there is a pragmatic stance that says for some purpose we need understand no more. This is the kind of stance taken, for example, by Eliezer in "The Simple Truth" with regards to epistemology. In contrast, I've previously talked about what happens if you keep digging: you run up against the Problem of the Criterion and discover an epistemological gap that demands a leap of faith to cross (perhaps in a pragmatic way!). And so we see a tradeoff, albeit one with some hard limit

...
Down with Solomonoff Induction, up with the Presumptuous Philosopher
by Charlie Steiner — 2020-06-12T09:44:29.114Z

Followup to "The Presumptuous Philosopher, self-locating information, and Solomonoff induction"

In the comments last time, everyone seemed pretty content to ditch the Presumptuous Philosopher (who said that the universe with a trillion times the copies of you was a trillion times as likely), and go with Solomonoff induction (which says that the universe with a trillion times the copies of you is only a few times as likely). To rally some support for the Presumptuous Philosopher, here's a decision game for you.

The Game:

If you start out with a universe that has only one of you, and then Omega comes along and copies you, you now need an extra bit to say which you you are. If Omega has flipped a coin (or consulted a high-entropy bit string) to decide whether to copy you, you now think there is a 50% chance you're un-copied, and a 25% chance you're each of the copies (if you're not a Solomonoff inductor, pretend to be one for now).

So far, this seems, although not obvious, at least familiar. It's the "halfer" position in Sleeping Beauty, which you might also call Bostrom's "SSA" position. It's not widely accepted because of frequentist / pragmatic arguments like "if you did this experiment a bunch of times, each person would converge to a frequency of 2/3 copied and 1/3 non-copied" and abstract arguments about symmetry of information. But of course Solomonoff induction would reply that there's no symmetry between the different hypotheses about the universe, and so it's okay to make an asymmetrical assumption under which the more you're copied, the less your universe matters to the average.

But suppose now that Omega, in addition to maybe copying you at t_0, comes along and shoots the copy (or a deterministic one of the two yous) at t_1. After this happens, you now no longer need that extra bit to describe which you is you, and so the probabilities go back to being the same for the two hypotheses about the universe and Omega's coin.

So here's what Omega does. He has all of you play for chocolate bars, or some other short-term satisfying experience. After t_0, you get offered this deal: If you accept, then the no-copy you will get 2 chocolate bars and both copy-yous will lose 1.9 chocolate bars. Since you're so much more likely to be in the no-copy universe, you acc...
An online prediction market with reputation points
by kickboxer — 2020-06-12T09:29:57.905Z

This is an advert for an online prediction market in reputation points I’m making.

It’s still in development, but currently you can sign up with Facebook and trade in two markets I’ve set up. The current scores are provisional - I’ll reset everyone’s point balance at some point if this is successful, so don’t worry about making bad trades.

I largely followed a proposal by Paul Christiano, but I haven't implemented all his ideas yet.

I'd be grateful if people could make some trades so that I can check everything's working. I’d also like to hear people’s thoughts on this. In particular:

Would you and people you know use this? If not, why not?

How can I improve it? What features would you want?
What gripes do you have with Mustachianism?
by Adam Zerner — 2020-06-11T23:42:42.472Z

I'm referring to Mr. Money Mustache's blog and the philosophy that he preaches there.

I tend to agree with what he says, and perhaps border on being a fanboy. However, I never really stress tested these beliefs, and discussing gripes that others have with him seems like a good way of doing that.
Turns Out Interruptions Are Bad, Who Knew?
by Elizabeth — 2020-06-11T23:10:00.782Z

I’ve been known to accuse people who say open offices are “fine with a few mitigations” of not paying attention to the cost of their mitigations. I believed they shrunk their thoughts down to the point that not much was lost from an interruption, at the cost of only being able to think the thoughts that fit in that interval. Any thought that would take too long to process could not be conceived of.

I’ve also been known to accuse people who advocate for deep, uninterrupted work without the distractions of social media of “not understanding how valuable social media is to me”. And besides, my workflow works best with frequent breaks (that I choose the timing of) because I “background process”.

*Cough*

I maintained this illusion until, inspired by a stupidly expensive device that only does one thing, I taped my old phone to a bluetooth keyboard* and began to write in offline mode. It was immediately a magical experience. It was so *quiet*. I could go on my porch and write and it was quiet. My thoughts got much larger because I wasn’t subconsciously afraid I’d interrupt them. I began to feel angry at my laptop. Why did it insist on hurting me so much? Why couldn’t it be pure like the offline phone/keyboard experience? Why couldn’t I just create things?

[* I only found two bluetooth keyboards with an inlay for phones/tablets. The other one lacks a built in battery, and shipped with a broken key]

Locally, this lasted for about 10 minutes before the social media cravings kicked in. But that was enough. I deeply resented work for taking me away from my magic writing device and making everything so noisy.

Since I started, my desire for using the quiet device has waxed and waned. At first I thought this was reflective of some deep pathology, but after two weeks it looks a lot more like “sometimes the benefits of quiet outweighs the benefits of being able to look stuff up, sometimes they don’t’”. I’ve also changed how I interact on a connected device- I’m more likely to close Signal, less likely to open Twitter. This is less due to a utilitarian calculation of the costs and benefits of Twitter, and more that once I’m in a good state, I can notice how switching to Twitter is almost physically painful.

The problem is that I wasn’t wrong that social media was genuinely very valuable to me, and that was before we were all locked inside. But I definitely was wrong that getting ...
Covid-19 6/11: Bracing For a Second Wave
by Zvi — 2020-06-11T21:30:00.706Z

Last time: Covid-19 6/4: The Eye of the Storm

There has been a lot of news in the past week. Very little of it is actually about Covid-19.

That is not because Covid-19 went away. People are still dying. People are still being infected. In many places things are getting worse rather than better.

Despite this, our focus has turned elsewhere.

It seems like left-wing people now expect a second wave and blame it on the actions of right-wing people. While right-wing people expect a second wave and blame it on the actions of left-wing people.

Both give out a shrug emoji when it is suggested a second wave might be something worth preventing, or something we have the state or civilizational capacity to prevent.

I don’t think these conclusions came from good thinking. That does not make them wrong. I continue to mostly agree with the perspective that for all practical purposes we have done all that we can to prevent Covid-19 here in the United States. It seemed mostly right before the protests, and it seems clearly correct now. If our current behaviors cause a second wave, trying to stop it would be a cure worse than the disease. We lack both the will and the ability.

It has now been seventeen days since the murder of George Floyd. It does not seem like good measurements are being taken, but from what I can tell there has since then been a steady rise in the number of protesters, with peaks on the weekends, including in countries outside the United States. Meanwhile, official re-openings continue in many places, and increasing numbers disregard precautions regardless of official recommendations, as they see others disregarding them, and as they grow stir crazy.

The question is, are we going to ‘get away with’ our current and implied future package of behaviors? Or will things get worse before they get better?

Let’s see the data.

Infections by region:

Date
WEST
MIDWEST
SOUTH
NE ex-NY
NY

Mar 19-Mar 25
5744
6293
7933
8354
28429

Mar 26-Apr 1
15684
20337
24224
34391
52901

Apr 2-8
19455
31148
39618
56772
65604

Apr 9-15
16291
29267
35570
61921
64463

Apr 16-22
20065
34130
33932
64669
43437

Apr 23-29
20263
42343
33773
62189
42475

Apr 30-May 6
23216
49205
37880
51693
24287

May 7-May 13
22419
43256
37591
40209
16683

May 14-May 20
22725
42762
40343
39273
13709

May 21-May 27
23979
39418
42977
26434
10595

May 28-June 3
32200
31504
50039
24250
9120

June 4-Jun

...
2020 LessWrong Demographics Survey
by B Jacobs — 2020-06-11T20:05:41.859Z

Edit: The survey is now closed. You can see the results here

DISCLAIMER: This is not a return of the old annual survey. I am not a mod nor an owner of this website. This means that the raw data from this survey gets released publicly (but your responses will be anonymous). Feel free to not answer any question you feel uncomfortable about. The survey will also be a lot shorter than the old annual surveys (32 questions). It will be closed on the 13th of July, I will show the results in a separate post titled "2020 LessWrong Demographics Survey Results"

You can start taking the survey (<10 minutes) by clicking on the following link:

https://forms.gle/XHaXpXVNmnXLEAFW6
Welcome to Casablanca Rationalists [Edit With Your Details]
by K. Ouafi — 2020-06-11T19:35:31.800Z

(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)

What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?

How frequently does your group organize events or meet?

Who would be a good fit for you group?

Should they have any particular skills or have done some specific background reading?
Cartesian Boundary as Abstraction Boundary
by johnswentworth — 2020-06-11T17:38:18.307Z

Meta note: this post involves redefining several concepts in ways almost, but not quite, the same as their usual definitions - risking quite a bit of confusion. I'm open to suggestions for better names for things.

Intuition: a model of humans (or AIs, or other agenty things) as “agents” separate from their “environment” only makes sense at a zoomed-out, abstract level. When we look at the close-up details, the agent-environment distinction doesn’t exist; there is no “Cartesian boundary” with interactions between the two sides mediated by well-defined input/output channels.

Meanwhile, back in the lab,

some guy

has been talking about a

general formalization of abstraction

. Elevator pitch version: far-apart components of a low-level model are independent given some high-level summary data. For example, the dynamics of the plasmas in far-apart stars are approximately independent given some high-level summary of each star - specifically its total mass, momentum and center-of-mass position. The low-level model includes full plasma dynamics; the high-level abstract model just includes one point mass representing each star.

This notion of abstraction sounds like it should fit our intuition about agency: we model humans/AIs/etc as agents in some high-level model, but not necessarily in the underlying low-level model.

This post will flesh out that idea a bit. It will illustrate the general picture of an abstraction boundary serving as a Cartesian boundary for a high-level agent model.

Programs

To avoid prematurely dragging in confusing intuitions about agency, we’ll start by talking about a program running on a laptop.

The source code of a program specifies exactly what it should do at a high level; it specifies the abstract model. It does not specify the low-level behavior, e.g. machine code and register addresses, or precise voltages in each transistor at each time, or the physical layout of circuit components on the CPU. The job of compiler/operating system writers and electrical engineers is to design and implement a low-level system which correctly abstracts into the high-level model specified by the source code. We’ll call the whole system for implementing programs out of atoms a “compiler stack”; it includes not just compilers, but also the physical hardware on which a program runs. It’s an end-to-end tool for turning source code into physical behavior.

What does it me...
Two Kinds of Mistake Theorists
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-06-11T14:49:47.186Z

Conflict theorists default to blaming a bad guy. Entrenched power is exploiting others for selfish gain. Explaining away the problems in the world as the result of mistakes only gives the oppressor/barbarian/authoritarian cover. This description is brief and reductive only because I'm trying to focus on mistake theory. It's not intended as a straw man, just a brief summary.

Opposed to them are mistake theorists. There are two kinds.

Object-level mistake theorists reject the idea that evil will, "isms," or conspiracies are to blame for object-level disagreement between groups. Chalk it up to coordination, communication, or motivation challenges; the scarcity of some key resource; or the fact that some problems are just really hard. But it's almost certainly not due to evil intentions.

I call them "object-level" mistake theorists because they use their theory to interpret the sorts of controversies you'd read about in the news. They don't use it to interpret the meta-controversy between conflict or mistake theorists. Object-level mistake theorists see conflict theorists as sophisticated intellectuals who are acting on a theory they happen to disagree with.

Here is how an object-level mistake theorist might model various kinds of conflict theorist take on some contemporary American political issues:

ANTIFA is angry about institutional racism, and think the best way to fix that problem is by burning cop cars. They think power gives up nothing without a demand. Or else, police unions are angry that ANTIFA deliberately downplay the gritty realities of the world to have a bad guy for their political narrative.
The battle between the Discovery Institute and evolutionists isn't about science. It's a political battle for or against a step toward American Christian theocracy. Both sides know that taking each others' arguments seriously would be a fatal mis-step.
Socialists are trying to use an expanded safety net as a prelude to full-on class warfare and ever-escalating demands for more entitlements. Or, conservatives are opposed to simplifying the IRS because they want to make interacting with the government as hateful as possible, so that people won't trust it to do anything else right.

The object-level mistake theorist thinks all these arguments are wrong, but sincerely held. They assume that conflict theorist...
Is there something like a "meta-encyclopedia"?
by Pablo — 2020-06-11T12:16:08.423Z

With Wikipedia showing increasing signs of ideological uniformity, I thought I should try to diversify my consumption of reference material. A potentially very useful tool for this purpose would be a "meta-encyclopedia", i.e. a place where users can find a list of all existing encyclopedia entries on a given topic. Questions:

1. Does something like this exist?

2. If not, what are the closest substitutes?

My current method is to simply do a Google search for the topic of interest followed by the word 'encyclopedia', e.g. 'comparative advantage encyclopedia'. This method is already quite useful, with a much lower false-positive rate than I would have expected, though I feel there's still considerable room for improvement.
Does equanimity prevent negative utility?
by Chris_Leong — 2020-06-11T07:00:42.130Z

Even though I've only just begun dabbling in meditation, I believe that it is an incredibly powerful tool. I do have one worry though relating to what exactly counts as suffering. If I scald myself, this triggers my pain nerves to fire and it is possible that this produces negative utility, even if my conscious mind is able to maintain complete equanimity?

And while it might produce less negative utility in most cases, it is possible that someone who can achieve equanimity might voluntarily choose to put themselves in situations where they experience far more suffering than they ever would without this ability with the end result being net negative for them. A large part of what worries me is that I am massively uncertain about this issue and I honestly don't have any idea of how we could settle it conclusively.

Some factors that might make us more likely to believe this is the case:

If we believe that insects feel pain that is axiologically relevant, then this would demonstrate that higher-level processing isn't a necessary component
Multiagent models of the brain make it more plausible that one might experience pain, whilst another isn't
Panpsychism could be taken to suggest that it is possible for individual components of the brain to suffer independently
Ideology/narrative stabilizes path-dependent equilibria
by Eli Tyre — 2020-06-11T02:50:35.929Z

I originally published this on Musings and Rough Drafts, in December 2019. I'm posting it here, because I'm interested in folks' thoughts.

[Epistemic status: speculative essay, perhaps too speculative to be appropriate for LessWrong]

Power

Lately I’ve been reading (well, listening to) the Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, which is something like a realpolitik analysis of how power works, in general. To summarize in a very compressed way: systems of power are made up of fractal hierarchies of cronies who support a leader (by providing him the means of power: the services of an army, the services of a tax-collector, votes that keep him in office) in return for special favors. Under this model, institutions are pyramids of “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” relationships.

This overall dynamic (and its consequences) is explained excellently in this 18 minute CGP Grey video. Highly recommended, if you haven’t watched it yet.

Coups

One consequence of these dynamics is how coups work. In a dictatorship, if an upstart can secure the support of the army, and seize the means of revenue generation (and perhaps the support of some small number of additional essential backers) he gets to rule.

This often happens in actual dictatorships. The authors describe the case of Samuel Doe, a Sargent in the Liberian military, who one night, with a small number of conspirators, assassinated the current dictator of Liberia in his bed, seized control of the treasury, and declared himself the new president of Liberia. Basically, because he now controlled the money, and so would be the one to pay them, the army switched allegiances and legitimized his authority. [Note: I think there are lot of important details to this story that I don’t understand and might make my summary here, misleading or inaccurate.]

Apparently, this sort of coup is common in dictatorships.

Democracy

But I’m struck by how impossible it would be for someone to seize the government like that in the United States (at least in 2019). If a sitting president was voted out of office, but declared that he was not going to step down, it is virtually inconceivable that he could get the army and the bureaucracy to rally around him and seize / retain power, in flagrant disregard for the constitutional prot...
Good and bad ways to think about downside risks
by MichaelA — 2020-06-11T01:38:46.646Z

This post was written for Convergence Analysis.

Many actions we could take to make the world better might also have negative effects, or might even be negative overall. In other words, altruistic actions often have downside risks. Perhaps, for example, that project you might start, career path you might pursue, or article you might write could lead to information hazards, memetic downside risks, or risks of diverting resources (such as money or attention) from more valuable things.[1]

So if I’m considering doing something to make the world better, but know it might have downside risks, what should I do? How should I even think about that question?

Should I just stop worrying and go ahead, since I’m excited about this idea and my initial sense is that it’ll probably be beneficial?

Or should I be especially concerned about ensuring my actions don’t cause any harm, and thus steer heavily against any action with downside risks, even if the expected value of that action still seems good?

Or maybe that’s too strong - perhaps it might be fine for me to go ahead, and I certainly still want to, to have that positive impact. But maybe I have a duty to at least think carefully first, and to drop the idea if it is too risky, since these are policies I’d want people in general to comply with?

Or maybe I shouldn’t see this as just a matter of “compliance” - as some “duty” separate from having a positive impact. Maybe I should see avoiding causing accidental harm as just as valuable as “actively making things better” - as just another core part of my efforts to do good?

We (Convergence) have observed different people seeming to implicitly use each of these four broad perspectives on downside risks.[2] We’ll refer to these perspectives as, respectively:

The unconcerned perspective

The harm-avoidance perspective[3]

The compliance perspective

The pure expected value (or pure EV) perspective

In this post, we’ll unpack these four perspectives, and we’ll argue in favour of using the pure EV perspective. Note that this doesn’t require always performing explicit EV calculations; often only a quick, qualitative, intuitive assessment of EV will be warranted. Relatedly, this article is not about methods for estimating EV (see here for links relevant to that topic). Instead, this article focuses on arguing that, in essence, one should consider both potential benefits and potential h...