trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The questions one needs not address
by George3d6 — 2020-03-21T19:51:01.764Z
Link: https://blog.cerebralab.com/The_questions_one_needs_not_address

Two years ago, I would have proclaimed a cautious bias towards thinking religion is a bad idea.

Since then, having read a bunch of “religious” philosophers and observed a bunch of “religious” people, I came to the conclusion that “religion” is a term I will start shying away from using at all, because it’s ill defined. It encompasses too many ideas to be a useful point of discussion.

As a specific example, let’s look at Sunni Islam and some things most people would probably like and dislike about it:

1. I once visited Burj Khalifa and was told that the highest livable floor in the building (158) is dedicated to a mosque. (Googling this fact I find claims that it’s an urban myth, but I can’t find strong evidence one way or another. For the purposes of this article let’s assume the tour guide wasn’t lying).

I find this to be a very nice thing. Here you have the tallest building in the world and you could sell the top floor for billions of dollars, or have it be the king’s apartment, or show it off to important officials to brag and to flatter them… but instead you decide to build a place of worship.

It’s the sort of act that says “Yeah, we made this awe-inspiring thing, but we really owe it to thousands of of past generations. None of us can fully comprehend how we managed to do this, so let’s dedicate its highest floor to something transcendent, something that symbolizes the beautiful, impossible and absurd experiment that made it possible, our society”.

It’s the sort of thing I like about the Catholic faith or any other faith when I walk into their places of worship, adorned in such beauty that they really make you stop, calm down and contemplate in awe and wonder.

2. On 11-9-2001 a group of Sunni terrorists decided that Americans were the worst possible evil and that harming them and their country is an act so moral and just that it’s worth dying for.

This is the kind of action born out of an ethical smugness that even I can’t comprehend, and I’m quite an ethically smug person.

It’s thinking that you can be so right as to warrant doing an action which will be viewed as horrible by most of the world, but completely disregarding their opinion because you obviously have it right.

Itȁ...
March 20th: Daily Coronavirus Links
by habryka — 2020-03-21T19:17:33.320Z

As part of the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, Ben, Elizabeth and I are publishing daily update posts with all the new links we are adding each day that we ranked a 3 or above in our importance rankings. Here are all the top links that we added yesterday (March 20th), by topic.

Dashboards

Worldwide current and historical stats

History of number and percent infections, recoveries, deaths, worldwide. Uses John Hopkins data

Guides/FAQs/Intros

Kurzgesagt: Accessible video to basic science of C19

High quality (in both production values and content) intro to the physical form of C19 and how it interacts with the body

(EV): They state that C19 can invade immune cells, but the only identified C19 receptor isn't on immune cells, and the paper they cite is for SARS proper, not C19

Medical System

WHO coordinates C19 drug trials

WHO to coordinate multinational testing of remdesivir (lopinavir + ritonavir) and chloroquine (malaria)

Do more with fewer tests by batching

Batching multiple people's samples could give us much more information with the same number of tests, at the cost of slower results

Guide to C19 pharma in development

A guide to the vaccine and treatment regiments currently in testing

List of hospitals requesting donations of equipment

Aggregation of hospital requests for donors to tackle

Progression & Outcome

Optimistic scenario exploration

Long now explores a set of assumptions, unproven but consistent with current knowledge, under which things might be pretty okay

Video explanation of basic C19 science

Great explanation of C19's form and lifecycle, including explanations of how certain potential treatments could work

Spread & Prevention

Video: estimating prevalence from deaths

Estimating actual COVID 19 cases (novel corona virus infections) in an area based on deaths. Based on work by Tomas Pueyo.

(EV): They're still only using cases that came to the attention of medical authorities, potentially missing people w/o severe symptoms

Work & Donate

SoGive's C19 donation guide

A short list of recommendations for organizations that would benefit from more money and are (perhaps indirectly) fighting COVID-19

Link to Full Database
Blog Post Day II
by Daniel Kokotajlo — 2020-03-21T16:39:04.280Z

TL;DR: You are invited to join us online on Saturday the 28th of March, to write that blog post you've been thinking about writing but never got around to. This is the second event of this type; the first one went well. Please comment if you are thinking about joining so I can gauge interest.

The Problem:

Like me, you are too scared and/or lazy to write up this idea you've had. What if it's not good? I started a draft but... Etc.

Alternatively: Coronavirus got you down? Cooped up inside? Looking for something new to do, someone new to talk to? How about you write a blog post?

The Solution:

1. Higher motivation via Time Crunch and Peer Encouragement

We'll set an official goal of having the post put up by midnight. Also, we'll meet up in a special-purpose discord channel to chat, encourage each other, swap half-finished drafts, etc. If like me you are intending to write the thing one day eventually, well, here's a reason to make that day this day.

2. Lower standards via Time Crunch and Safety in Numbers

Since we have to be done by midnight, we'll all be under time pressure and any errors or imperfections in the posts will be forgivable. Besides, they can always be fixed later via edits. Meanwhile, since a bunch of us will be posting on the same day, writing a sloppy post just means it won't be read much, since everyone will be talking about the handful of posts that turn out to be really good. If you are like me, these thoughts are comforting and encouraging.

Evidence this Works:

MIRI Summer Fellows Program had a Blog Post Day towards the end, and it was enormously successful. It worked for me, for example: It squeezed two good posts out of me. (OK, so one of them I finished up early the next morning, so I guess it technically doesn't count. But in spirit it does: It wouldn't have happened at all without Blog Post Day.) More importantly, MSFP keeps doing this every year, even though opportunity cost for them is much higher (probably) than the opportunity cost for you or me. And we did a Blog Post Day on LW last month and it worked great.

Side Benefits:

It'll be fun!
[Meta] Do you want AIS Webinars?
by Linda Linsefors — 2020-03-21T16:01:02.814Z

Ever now and then I talk to someone who tell me that they can not get good feedback on their research (e.g. the they don't get much responses on their alignment forum post), and been thinking about how to solve this? Also, right now is a good time to try out various online solutions.

I am offering to run webinars if enough people are interested.

The format I suggest is that each webinar is 1h 40min and centers around one person presenting their idea or result.

5 min introduction
30 min presentation
30 min of questions and discussion centered around trying to understand and improve idea.
30 min of attacking the idea to find out all the ways it can fail.
5 min rounding off but the presenter summering what their take away is.

The reason I suggest this structure is

I think a webinar needs a structure to keep on track
It is important to look for weaknesses in an idea, but it is even more important to fist understand it and to make sure you attack the strongest version of that idea.

I am very much open to different format, and would like to experiment a bit if there is enough interest.

Edit: Not sure if I should interpret up votes as interest. If this is something you would like to participate in, pleas leave a comment.
mRNA vaccine development for COVID-19
by ChristianKl — 2020-03-21T15:17:17.577Z

Epistemological status:

A bunch of sources and a reasoning while reading the source. Go to the sources for the factual claims and reason about claims and say if you think I made a mistake. Join the conversation in the comments.

Between CureVac and BioNTech, two of the three companies that have platforms for mRNA vaccine production are German. It might be faster to develop new vaccines with such mRNA technology then to develop old protein based vaccines. The technology is the hope that we will get a vaccine sooner then we would get a vaccine that's produced the traditional way.

BigPharma giant Johnson & Johnson that uses a more traditional approach to developing vaccines expects to hit clinical trials only in

November

.

Moderna, the third company with such technology, that’s from the US, started their human trials on

16th of March

. BioNTech, announced a $135 million partnership with Shanghai-based Fosun Pharmaceutical Group to co-develop its COVID-19 vaccine candidate in China. They are going to start clinical trials in

late April

because they can leverage Fosun’s Chinese “clinical trial, regulatory and commercial capabilities”.

In their conference call CureVac said that

after talking with regulators

they will only do their clinical trials in early summer. This gives the impression that the German regulatory bodies prevent them to go as fast as the Moderna trials in Seattle or BioNTech trials in China.

The EU just gave CureVac 80 million Euro funding to scale up their production capacity to be able to produce 1 billion vaccine doses in one campaign. It’s great that they fund production capacity but it would be worthwhile if EU and German regulators would also reduce the red tape so that CureVac can start human trials in other jurisdictions.

This situation looks to me like it would be beneficial if we can push EU/German regulators to cut red tape for CureVac in addition to giving money or another jurisdiction would allow them to run their human trials earlier.

(While researching this post I also created a

Google Sheet

that lists more COVID-19 vaccine efforts)
Would a tax on AI products be useful?
by Mati_Roy — 2020-03-21T04:00:15.139Z

On one hand, it would capture part of the negative externality in the market pricing. And the money could be used to finance AI safety research.

On the other hand, maybe AI companies would think their responsability are limited to paying that tax and that's it.

It might also be hard to implement and enforce. What counts as AI? Which part of the profit was made because of the AI component?

What other considerations are there? What do you think of this idea? How desirable and feasible is it? Has anyone written on this?

Motivations for asking:

Get people to think about this

Improve my understanding of economics
What would be the consequences of commoditizing AI?
by Mati_Roy — 2020-03-21T03:56:15.029Z

Related:

Competition is for Losers with Peter Thiel (key takeaway: making profit is all about creating a monopoly)

Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement (key takeaway: you can't make profit if you've been commoditized)

I think the common thinking on this is that commoditization would foster fierce competition, which would create an environment where companies are optimized to respond to market pressure, and so cutting corners on safety and other public good, whereas a monopoly would have more slack to care about those things.

That seems right to me, and probably the bulk of the consequence weight goes there when thinking about monopolizing AI vs commoditizing it.

But other considerations I had were:

if AI is commoditized, then there might be less AI R&D

if AI is commoditized, then all the economic surplus might go to the consumers instead of the shareholders (hence preventing massive economical inequality)

Maybe all the answers are in Strategic Implications of Openness in AI
Development and I should reread the paper (it's been a while).

Motivation for asking: I might have some vague proto-ideas on how to commoditize it.
What's the present value of the Future?
by Mati_Roy — 2020-03-21T03:35:29.745Z

Present value: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/presentvalue.asp

If the question is a confusion, I'd also like to know why.

I have a sufficiently related question that I'll just post it here:

If everyone knew Alphabet would create a fast take-off friendly superintelligence in 2120, except (or including, depending on your values) it would be a libertarian world (meaning the wealth would be redistributed to the shareholders), then how much would Alphabet be worth? (related: After which year does it stop being worth some relevant threshold?)

(Of course, this question is just an approximation of a potential future, but I still think it's a valuable one.)

My first stab at the question of Alphabet:

1.07 increase per year ^ 100 years = ~10^3 multiples

value of the the world = ~10^13 USD

value of the Sun: 10^25 operations = ~10^25 human lives

Even with a 1000 discount, and assuming a human-life equivalent of operation is worth 1 USD, the present value would still be 10^22 USD, much more than world total asset value. This means that even with a 1 in a 10^12 chance of this happening, opportunity cost aside, all assets should be invested there. The opportunity cost just/mostly means other investments might have a higher probability (like other AI companies). Why aren't AI companies worth massively more?

Related post: Why don't singularitarians bet on the creation of AGI by buying stocks?

Related: I saw an article (I think on https://aiimpacts.org/, but I can't find it back) that was proposing economic growth might never be as fast as it was between 1990 and 2010, while still offering exponential growth. Do you have a link to that article?

Motivations for asking:

Better understanding how economics work

Maybe invest in AI companies
Near-term planning for secondary impacts of coronavirus lockdowns [assuming things don't blow up]
by VipulNaik — 2020-03-21T02:43:50.925Z

In this document, I attempt to discuss the impact of the coronavirus
lockdown and how to prepare for it. This is not focused on the direct
impact of coronavirus, but rather on the secondary impact of
precautions that people are taking, including the lockdowns and the
new normal of staying home and working from home.

The document is written in an imperative tone, focused on what to
do. However, please don't read into this tone the idea that I am
confident of these suggestions and authoritatively pushing them. They
are just ideas!

Many of these ideas are self-justifying, but I have not tried to
justify their relative importance to other ideas that I have
omitted. Subject to time constraints, I'll be happy to answer specific
questions challenging the ideas, or comparing them to other ideas I
didn't list. If you have a question of that sort, there's a good
chance I'll just agree that the idea I didn't list was more important.

My initial draft of this post included some discussion of potential
future timelines, but I decided to omit that in order to make the post
focus on ideas for dealing with the situation. I may separately write
about possible futures.

General ideas

Expect a three-month timeline for the lockdown (i.e., lockdown
continuing till the end of June), with the possibility of a
six-month, twelve-month, or even eighteen-month lockdown. Even if
a strict lockdown lasts much less, health advice may still recommend
that you shelter in place for additional time.

Brace for impact! Prepare psychologically. Plan for three months of
lockdown; it could be shorter, but it could also be much longer. If
you overprepare a little bit because the lockdown lasts just one
month, you'll need to write off the effort, but that'll be less
painful than forming expectations that this will end in a few weeks
and then constantly being disappointed at how much it's dragging
out.

It's ideal if all your concrete actions are "no-regret" -- so that
if the lockdown lasts longer or shorter than you expect, the
action still gives you some lasting benefit. But this may not
always be possible.

Keep a buffer (material goods, liquid savings, other reserves), but
don't engage in panic actions to build buffers.

Impact on day-to-day life experience

Since we're talking of a three-month timeline for a lockdown (and
possibly much longer), you have to think of a sustainable way to
manage your l

...
March 19th: Daily Coronavirus Links
by habryka — 2020-03-21T00:00:54.173Z

As part of the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, Ben, Elizabeth and I are publishing daily update posts with all the new links we are adding each day that we ranked a 3 or above in our importance rankings. Here are all the top links that we added yesterday (March 19th), by topic.

DIY

Instructions for making a mask out of HEPA paper

Step by step instructions, with pictures, on how to form a mask out of HEPA filters or otherwise unwoven fabric. In Chinese but google translate was perfectly understandable

(EV): In Chinese but google translate was perfectly understandable

Medical System

China's guide to diagnosis and treatment

China's official C19 handbook, translated into English by them

Chinese Hospital's C19 guide

Zhejiang School of Medicine's hospital outlines how to prevent, identify, and treat COVID019

Trial using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin

N=20, hyrodxychloroquine was effective, and moreso combined with azithromycin

Science

Technical review of diagnosis techniques

Introduction to various categories and molecular methods for diagnosing COVID19, outline companies and academic groups developing diagnostics

Spread & Prevention

Why does Japan have so few cases

Japan has ~900 cases despite being very dense and mostly continuing daily life (with the exception of the school shut down). Why?

(EV): I wonder what their pneumonia case rate is doing

Why does India have so few cases

India has only just had its 3rd C19 death. How did they do so well? Possibly aggressive border action

(EV): I also wonder what their pneumonia case rate is doing

Full Database Link
What is the impact of a pandemic on the world economy? Or what is the impact of the economy on the spread of a virus? The limits of human networks
by HansNauj — 2020-03-20T22:33:13.638Z

Juan G. Diaz Ochoa

In the current virus outbreak, we all are experiencing for the first-time restrictions like those in war times and suddenly life is feeling like a bad B movie. The impact is not only in our private lives, but also in our economy and fundamental social interactions. Now, regarding the current facts, and making a comparison with the SARS outbreak of 2002, there is a constant question: why in that time there has been no global pandemic, and why we are now seeing a rapid propagation of a virus? Similarly, why we are experiencing a global deterioration of social norms and democracies? Perhaps there is a problem with the size of our networks[1].

Besides the obvious analysis of the biology of the virus (SARS-1 in 2002 vs. SARS-2 in 2020), we must not forget the structure of the networks making possible its spread. We are seeing not only the propagation of one infection in a large network, but in reality, the outbreak of different coinfections of different nature (biological, social) that are mutually influenced (Chen u. a. 2013).

A network growth subsequently associated to the spread of one “infection” (distribution of production systems and delivery chains or even envy[2] (Ramírez Barrios, Díaz Ochoa, und Schneider 2007)) is followed by the spread or other infections with a biological (viruses) and social character (misinformation or trends). In all cases there is a critical threshold in the network size and topology allowing a massive spread of tendencies or infections, and all of them have a mutual influence [3].

Humans have built a large-scale system that extends into a global network that is fragile due to its complexity and tendency to promote homogeneity over diversity. The growth of this network has been very rapid and indiscriminate with great environmental impact in different regions and scales, particularly afterthe world wide web, the end of the Cold War, trade deals, and new, rapidly developing economies fully entered in the global supplying chains after the fall of the Soviet Union. Some inconclusive analysis of the current outbreak just points to this environmental problem as first cause of this pandemics, since livestock, hosting such diseases[4] (Cui, Li, und Shi 2019), is transported to human settlements as a food source.

Unfortunately, the interconnection between different production chains favors the e...
Mediation From a Distance
by johnswentworth — 2020-03-20T22:02:46.545Z

Suppose we have an electronic circuit with two pieces: combinational logic and memory. The combinational logic is designed to behave as memoryless input/output logic gates - it has only short-term state, and computes some function. The memory reads the output of the combinational logic once per clock cycle, stores it, and feeds it back into the combinational logic as input during the next clock cycle. The causal diagram looks something like this:

Key point: even though there’s a path from the combinational logic state at the start of one clock cycle to its state at the start of the next cycle, that path has approximately-zero causal influence. We could intervene on the logic state right after the cycle starts:

… and the state at the start of the next cycle would not change at all.

In other words: in this model, the memory state mediates the influence of the logic state during one cycle on logic states during future cycles. This is not a property of the graph structure alone - it happens because the combinational logic does not have any long-term memory of its own.

Key problem for causal abstraction: how can we algorithmically detect situations like this?

One obvious answer is to probe the circuit experimentally. Counterfactual queries are particularly handy for this: we fix the random noise, then check which nodes would be changed by a counterfactual intervention on the logic state at some time. Try this for a bunch of different samples, and look for long-range mediation in the results.

One problem with this approach: we often want an abstraction which works on all possible “input values” of some variables. There may be exponentially many such values, and we’d have to check all of them to verify that the abstraction works.

An example: consider a ripple-carry adder (i.e. the electronic circuit version of grade-school long addition). Each stage adds two input bits and a carry bit from the previous stage, then passes its own carry bit to the next stage. We want to abstract from the low-level electronics to some higher-level model.

If we’re using a 64-bit adder, then there are 2^(2*64) possible inputs. For almost all of those (specifically all but about 2^64 of them), flipping one low-order bit will not change the high-order bit. But if we want our adder to work on all possible inputs, then we need to account for the one-in-2^64...
The Hammer and the Dance
by Chris_Leong — 2020-03-20T16:09:26.740Z
Link: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56

I'm currently running the Effective Altruism Coronavirus Discussion FB group. I saw a large number of posts each day, but this seems like the most important post for people to read at the moment because in order to know what to do, we need to have an idea of the end-game. Now obviously we need to discuss this post and consider possible flaws, ideally receiving input from epidemiologists, but I think this looks pretty promising.