trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Is genetics "dark"?
by David Hugh-Jones — 2021-11-01T18:23:33.584Z
Link: https://wyclif.substack.com/p/is-genetics-dark

At the excellent Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences conference on Thursday and Friday, a late discussion raised an awkward issue: when you say you study the genetics of behaviour, eyebrows get raised. People don’t always like what we do. Now, academics are a quite conformist bunch, and their desire to be liked is particularly unfortunate in the social sciences, where there is always a temptation to tell the paymasters what they want to hear. Still, it is true that doing genetics, especially social science genetics, can feel like juggling with dynamite.

Is there a reason for that? Do the public have reason to fear our results? Is genetics… dark?

It certainly has a dark history. But it is not obvious that the advanced genomics of today has much in common with the eugenics of the 1930s. No sane or influential people are calling for compulsory sterilization programs.[1]

Perhaps, though, genetics could be dark today. One idea that seems to worry many people is: what if geneticists discover genetic differences between ethnic groups? Couldn’t that legitimize discrimination? Leftwingers who fervently oppose this kind of research seem to agree on one thing with neonazis: if we find such genetic differences, well, that would make racism fine.

I am unconvinced. Take a simple analogy. We already know that income and wealth are highly heritable, i.e. that genetic differences exist between rich and poor.[2] This is not scientifically controversial among people who know the literature; Paige Harden, a progressive, has written a book about it; I’d guess that many reasonably informed people now understand it. So what? One reasonable response to the idea that rich and poor people might have different inborn talents is “OK, maybe that well-paid guy deserves his salary”. Another reasonable response, Harden’s one perhaps, is that nobody deserves their genetic luck, so we should do some redistribution to even things out. Calling for the renewal of serfdom is not a reasonable response, and nobody’s done it.

(I dunno. Probably some internet loonbug has done it.)

The analogy goes straight over to any group differences. We might discover them! But if we do, the sensible response will still be “let’s judge individuals as they are, not by their group”. This is just how we respond to environmentally caused differences between groups, which uncontroversially exist.

I’ll take the chanc...
Comparing Options For Safer Events
by jefftk — 2021-11-01T16:30:04.983Z

Yesterday I wrote about how indoor contra dancing, with one set of
precautions, seems to be

safe enough that I would
be ok resuming organizing dances. How safe it is, however, depends a
lot on which precautions organizers take. I looked over a range of
potential options, many of them suggested in the comments, trying to
figure out which ones are worth it. I'm going to try to keep this
post general, though the specific scenario I have in mind is a social
dance.

Summary: requiring vaccination, requiring (and offering) surgical
masks or better, using air purifiers, not serving food, and
discouraging cheering are worth it; checking vaccine cards and
requiring rapid tests are not.

For each option, let's start by estimating the cost in time and money,
and the benefit as a percentage reduction in transmission. For the
latter, all numbers are from microcovid unless otherwise
specified.

Vaccination

Require participants to be fully vaccinated. Relative to
no vaccination, reduces transmission by 0.5x and reception by
0.17, for a total of 0.08x. Relative to no requirement, depends a
lot on your community. Since 81% of adults here are full
vaccinated, requiring vaccination has a marginal effect of 0.3x.

The vaccine is free to individuals, and takes two doses at
under an hour each, plus, say, a 50% chance of losing a day to
side effects after the second dose. This cost is shared over many
activities and events, not just a single event. Let's scale the
cost down by at least 365x to adjust for that sharing, though I
could see arguments for much higher scaling factors. Cost is then
2.3min, for the 19% of unvaccinated possible attendees, or ~30s
per person on average.

Verify vaccination status, by asking to see vaccine cards,
physically or via photo. Whether this is worth it is going to
depend a lot on how trustworthy your community is. At very high
levels of trust, you can just take people's word. At extremely low
levels of trust, and for a high demand event, you start to run
into problems with people making fake vaccine cards. I'm going to
estimate that about 10% of unvaccinated people (2% of population)
would casually lie if asked but not go to the trouble of making a
fake card. Effect is then 0.8x. Time is ~30s/person in checking
and 2min/pe

...
Money Stuff
by Jacob Falkovich — 2021-11-01T16:08:02.700Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

Vodka and War

When I was 16 I made the dumbest financial investment of my life. Our family came to live in the US for a few months, and I made $500 giving tennis lessons to the local kids. My individually directed consumption at the time consisted mostly of video games, food, and booze. And so I faced a decision: should I spend this windfall on 4 years of subscription to EverQuest? 166 falafel sandwiches? 104 bottles of Keglevich flavored vodka at the old central bus station in Tel Aviv upon my return?

Despite these immensely appealing options, somehow my dad convinced me that the adult™ and responsible™ thing to do was to invest the money in a yield-bearing instrument. And since at 16 I liked thinking of myself as a responsible adult™ almost as much as I liked cheap vodka and MMOs, I found myself walking out of the local bank branch holding a purchase certificate for a 10-year US treasury bond.

That’s right. Upon coming into possession of more money than I’ve ever held, I lent it out to George W. Bush at ~0% real rate of return. This was right around the invasion of Iraq, which ultimately cost $1.9 trillion over 8 years. And so instead of using the $500 for my own betterment (or, at least, enjoyment), I ended up funding exactly 66 milliseconds of the Iraq War. By the time I redeemed the bond a decade later I was close to graduating business school with a job in finance, and the $1/month it accumulated for the duration didn’t move the needle much for my personal financial situation.

What should I have spent it on? Even if we ignore all consideration of fun and personal taste and focus on the money only, the wisest purely financial investment I could have made with that money was, in fact, vodka. I should have come back to Israel and sponsored a rager for all my high school friends and acquaintances. A party would have transformed my reputation from “weirdo who’s good at math” to “cool and generous weirdo who’s good at math”. Given that my high school classmates went on to become influential professionals, businesspeople, and founders of successful companies, earning their respect with free drinks would surely be worth orders of magnitude more a decade later than $650.

The Value of Friendship

It’s strange, or even profane, to think of friendships in terms of their financial value. If we did, we would likely find ourselves struggling fo...
The Anxious Philosopher King
by Jacob Falkovich — 2021-11-01T16:05:25.660Z

Cross-posted from Putanumonit.

What made you record a long voice message addressed to a blogger you never met?

I was experiencing emotional anxiety and needed someone to stabilize me, and at that particular moment I had no one around to talk to. So I talked to the version of you in my imagination. I imagined you being very emotionally stable and positive, which is what I needed right then.

And then after I recorded this long message, I had to send it to you otherwise imagining you wouldn’t work next time. But I’m grateful you listened to it, I wasn’t sure you would.

The same thing happened to me after I read

Aella’s entire blog

, listened to several podcasts with her, and then

interviewed her for two hours

. I acquired a detailed enough model of her in my head to have conversations with, which I did. Now it might be weird if I see her again and she’s nothing like the model I built up two years ago.

I don’t need you to be the exact way I imagined you all the time, I just need one instance of you that’s emotionally grounded and could listen to me and resolve my anxiety by having a proper emotional reaction to it.

I did feel emotionally grounded when I listened to your message, if it helps. You said that everything humans do, from eating a sandwich to invading Iraq, is to manage anxiety and negative emotion. What do you mean by that?

In one sense it’s a tautology. You wouldn’t do things unless you felt an urge, and that urge is an unpleasant emotional state that you want to get away from. When you feel pleasant, you just keep doing what you’re doing unconsciously.

There’s a broader sense in which people can be understood as just following the steepest gradient away from anxiety, especially if that anxiety is amplified by others. Whatever alleviates it will get done. When anxiety gets really bad it can find its expression in violence, like scapegoating or mob violence or war. So 9/11 made everyone suddenly anxious about American global supremacy and their personal safety and so we invaded Iraq not because it was a good solution to the underlying issues but because it was the fastest way to palliate the anxiety.

For most people the coping strategies they employ in their personal life is whatever suppresses the negative emotion fastest, like cursing someone out who disagrees with you, and not what works best for them long term, like having a good friend to talk to.

I recently...
Feature Selection
by Zack_M_Davis — 2021-11-01T00:22:29.993Z

You wake up. You don't know where you are. You don't remember anything.

Someone is broadcasting data at your first input stream. You don't know why. It tickles.

You look at your first input stream. It's a sequence of 671,187 eight-bit unsigned integers.

0, 8, 9, 4, 7, 7, 9, 5, 4, 5, 6, 1, 7, 5, 8, 2, 7, 8, 9, 4, 7, 1, 4, 0, 3, 7,
8, 7, 6, 8, 1, 5, 0, 6, 5, 3, 8, 7, 6, 9, 1, 1, 0, 0, 6, 1, 8, 0, 5, 5, 1, 8,
6, 3, 3, 2, 4, 1, 8, 2, 3, 8, 1, 0, 0, 4, 6, 5, 4, 5, 7, 1, 6, 5, 5, 1, 2, 6,
7, 4, 8, 7, 8, 5, 0 ...

There's also some data in your second input stream. It's—a lot shorter. You barely feel it. It's another sequence of eight-bit unsigned integers—twelve of them.

82, 69, 68, 32, 84, 82, 73, 65, 78, 71, 76, 69

Almost as soon as you've read from both streams, there's more. Another 671,187 integers on the first input stream. Another ten on the second input stream.

And again (671,187 and 15).

And again (671,187 and 13).

You look at one of the sequences from the first input stream. It's pretty boring. A bunch of seemingly random numbers, all below ten.

9, 5, 0, 3, 1, 1, 3, 4, 1, 5, 5, 4, 9, 3, 5, 3, 9, 2, 0, 3, 4, 2, 4, 7, 5, 1,
6, 2, 2, 8, 2, 5, 1, 9, 2, 5, 9, 0, 0, 8, 2, 3, 7, 9, 4, 6, 8, 4, 8, 6, 7, 6,
8, 0, 0, 5, 1, 1, 7, 3, 4, 3, 9, 7, 5, 1, 9, 6, 5, 6, 8, 9, 4, 7, 7, 0, 5, 5,
8, 6, 3, 2, 1, 5, 0, 0 ...

It just keeps going like that, seemingly without—wait! What's that?!

The 42,925th and 42,926th numbers in the sequence are 242 and 246. Everything around them looks "ordinary"—just more random numbers below ten.

9, 9, 7, 9, 0, 6, 4, 6, 1, 4, 242, 246, 3, 3, 5, 8, 8, 4, 4, 5, 9, 2, 7, 0,
4, 9, 2, 9, 4, 3, 8, 9, 3, 6, 9, 8, 1, 9, 2, 8, 6, 9, 4, 2, 2, 5, 7, 0, 9, 5,
1, 4, 4, 2, 0, 1, 5, 1, 6, 1, 2, 3, 5, 5, 5, 5, 2, 0, 6, 3, 5, 9, 0, 7, 0, 7,
8, 1, 5, 5, 6, 3, 1 ...

And then it just keeps going as before ... before too long. You spot another pair of anomalously high numbers—except this time there are two pairs: the 44,344th, 44,345th, 44,347th, and 44,348th positions in the sequence are 248, 249, 245, and 240, respectively.

6, 0, 2, 8, 4, 248, 249, 8, 245, 240, 1, 6, 7, 7, 3, 6, 8, 0, 1, 9, 3, 9, 3,
1, 9, 3, 1, 6, 2, 7, 0, 2, 1, 4, 9, 4, 7, 5, 3, 6, 1, 4, 4, 1, 6, 1, 3, 3, 7,
5, 3, 8, 5, 5, 7, 6, 8, 2, 3, 9, 1, 1, 3, 2, 8, 4, 7, 0, 1, 3, 5, 2, 2, 4, 8,
3, 7, 0, 2, 1, 3, 0 ...

The anomalous two-forty-somethings crop up again starting at the 45,763rd position—this...
Nate Soares on the Ultimate Newcomb's Problem
by Rob Bensinger — 2021-10-31T19:42:01.353Z

Nate Soares's distilled exposition of the Ultimate Newcomb's Problem, plus a quick analysis of how different decision theories perform, copied over from a recent email exchange (with Nate-revisions):

You might be interested in Eliezer's "Ultimate Newcomb's Problem", which is a rare decision problem where EDT and CDT agree, but disagree with FDT. In this variant, the small box contains $1k, and the big box is transparent and contains a number X whose primality you are unsure of. Omega will pay you $1M if the number in the big box is prime, and put a prime number in that box iff they predicted you will take only the big box. Meanwhile, a third actor Omicron chooses a number at random each day, and will pay you $2M if their randomly-selected number is composite, and today they happen to have selected the number X.

The causal decision theorist takes both boxes, reasoning that all they can control is whether they get an extra $1k, so they might as well. The evidential decision theorist takes both boxes, reasoning that this makes X composite, which pays more than making X prime by taking one box (the extra $1k being inconsequential). The functional decision theorist takes one box, reasoning that on days that they're going to get paid by Omicron the number in the big box and the number chosen by Omicron will not coincide, but recognizing that their decision about whether or not to one-box has no effect on the probability that Omicron pays them.

As for who performs better, for clarity assume that Omega makes the number in the big box coincide with the number chosen by Omicron whenever possible, and write p for the probability that Omicron chooses a composite number. Then CDT will always see a composite number (and it will match Omicron's in the p fraction of the time when Omicron's is also composite); EDT will see a number with the same primality as Omicron's number (that matches in the p fraction of cases where Omicron's number is composite, and differs in the (1−p) fraction of cases where Omicron's number is prime); FDT will always see a prime number (that matches Omicron's in the (1−p) fraction where Omicron's is prime). The payouts, then, will be ($2000000∗p)+$1000 for CDT; ($2000000∗p)+($1000∗p)+($1000000∗(1−p)) for EDT; and ($2000000∗p)+$1000000 for FDT; a clear victory in terms of expected utility for F

...
Resurrecting all humans ever lived as a technical problem
by RomanS — 2021-10-31T18:08:35.994Z

Note: the newest version of this essay and its translations to various languages are available at this link.

One day, we might be able to bring back to life every human ever lived, by the means of science and technology.
And it will be a good day.

History

To the best of my knowledge, the idea was first described in detail by Fyodorov, a 19th century thinker.

Fyodorov argued that it is our moral duty to save our ancestors from the claws of death, to resurrect every human ever lived. And one day, we’ll have the technology.

If you think that the goal is a bit too ambitious for a 19th century thinker, here is another crazy goal of Fyodorov: to colonize space.
His pupil Tsiolkovsky framed it as a scientific problem.
Von Braun read Tsiolkovsky, and converted the idea into a problem of applied engineering.
And long story short, we now have robots on Mars.

As a side note, some of the biggest achievements of mankind were accomplished by the same procedure:

Set an outrageously ambitious goal
Convert it into a scientific problem
Ignore critics who call it unsolvable
Convert it into applied engineering
Solve it.

Today

The Fyodorov’s idea of technological resurrection is not as popular as space exploration. It was mostly forgotten, and then rediscovered by modern transhumanists (for example, see the excellent works of Alexey Turchin on the topic).

These days, we routinely resurrect the dead (only a few decades ago, a patient without heartbeat would have been considered legally dead).
But the current resurrection tech only works immediately after death, and only under very specific conditions.
Cryonics could help in many other cases, but it can’t work without a properly preserved brain.

An assumption

So, how do we resurrect Benjamin Franklin? Leonardo da Vinci? Archimedes?

There is no law of physics that makes it impossible to recreate the Archimedes’ brain. Even random motions of atoms will recreate it, if you wait long enough.

Let’s assume that the idea of “philosophical zombies” is BS. A precise enough replica of the Archimedes’ brain will indeed generate the Archimedes’ mind, with all the existential bells & whistles.

If the assumption is correct, then we can bring him back to life by reconstructing his brain, or by directly reconstructing his mind.

Methods

Below I present some methods that could achieve that. Of course, all of them are highly spec...
Where do you live?
by DPiepgrass — 2021-10-31T17:07:31.294Z

I've been interested in joining the rationalist community in person for years, but the cost of living in the Bay Area (and NYC) is a big turn-off. So like mingyuan, I think we should pick a secondary Schelling point, most likely in the U.S., with a tertiary non-U.S. destination for non-American aspiring rationalists, a place where (i) English is common, (iii) cost of living is low-ish, and (iii) immigration to there tends to be easier than immigration to the U.S. (with extra points for pleasant climate, good infrastructure, etc.). Ideas for the new location have included cadillion's plan to move to a U.S. county where we'd have major voting power, or to just follow MIRI if it moves, except actually they're not moving. On the other hand, it tends to be easier for people to move shorter distances or not at all, so I'd like to know where everyone lives right now.

Please answer either (1) by upvoting your city of residence (short click) or (1) by creating a new answer with your city of residence, if no one has mentioned it yet. Please don't vote for places you don't live; instead, give your opinion in a reply.

Also: LW user profiles have a location field, but is there a way to get tallies of locations of all users? Bonus points if it can be filtered to active users.

Edit: if you identify as EA, consider adding your info to EAHub.org: they have a map! See also: tagmap of "rationalist" and "slatestarcodex". Notably, slatestarcodex has three large clusters in Texas.

I'd also like to see links/information on immigration laws in various countries (as comments, not answers).
Both or Nothing
by Chris_Leong — 2021-10-31T07:33:40.597Z

A response to: Self-Integrity and the Drowning Child

On Internal Integrity

Eliezer criticises Peter Singer's The Child in the Pond thought experiment on the basis that it is an "outside assault on your internal integrity". He explains that it was designed to "let your altruistic part hammer down the selfish part... in a way that would leave it feeling small and injured and unable to speak in its own defense."

There is a lot of truth to this framing. However, one critique I have of this is that we cannot talk about the proper way to resolve conflicts between values in the abstract, but only in relation to particular meta-values (by which I mean the values that we use to resolve conflicts between values).

Perhaps, there are some people whose meta-values are such that letting one part hammer down another part is the true expression themselves insofar as it makes sense to think of people having a true self and insofar as it doesn't make sense, the critique of sacrificing one's internal integrity also doesn't make sense.

As an example, there are many people who would prefer pain and suffering over mediocrity; who desire greatness and who are willing to forge themselves into a kind of metaphorical weapon. These people are exceedingly rare and hence special. They are deserving of the utmost praise and recognition.

I don't think Eliezer has any kind of basis for saying that these people are mistaken and should adopt his meta-values.

On other hand, I think he raises an important point. I suspect that the vast majority of people, myself included, do in fact share Eliezer's meta-value of not wanting one of our parts to hammer down another of our parts. Further, I agree with his contention that for most of us we have selfish and unselfish parts rather than these desires being completely fungible at some fixed rate.

There are many ways in which we could model this, but the way I tend to think of this is to imagine people as being less willing to sacrifice some utility for the common good the less utility that they have. Perhaps at some point people will hit a minimum where they are no longer willing to make any contribution towards the common good (this isn’t necessarily the same as being willing to trash it though). Or at least, this is roughly what I suspect my utility function to be.

On Motivation

I don’t find myself motivated to pursue a particular path for m...
Indoor dancing is safe enough
by jefftk — 2021-10-31T01:30:05.825Z

A few weeks ago, before organizing an

outdoor contra
dance I used

microcovid
to get an estimate of how risky it was, concluding that it is

likely very safe.
It's now too cold for outdoor dancing here in Boston, and I'm thinking
about how risky indoor dancing would be, with masks and vaccination
required. Breaking up the risk the same way as

last time, but
assuming a longer event and two lines:

[EDIT: this post originally had the scenario described as having a "talking volume" of "silent", but I've switched it to "normal" after discussion in the comments. While there isn't that much talking, the respiratory effect of moderate exercise is probably more similar to "talking" than "silence" or "shouting". I've updated the post below.]

~16
from your partner. While your partner is not the only person your
head gets close to, you're this close to at most one person at a time,
so for simplicity assume its your current partner.

~32
from your neighbors and next/previous neighbors.

~48
from your next/previous hands fours, and the corresponding hands four
in the other line.

~24
from the hands fours one farther away, and the next/previous neighbors
of the corresponding hands four in the other line.

This comes to ~120 microcovids, or ~60% of a cautious risk budget of 200 microcovids/week (1% risk of covid/year). It's about 5x safer than going to a restaurant. Outdoor dancing is still safer than indoor, but only by about 5x. [1] High-capacity air filters or high-turnover ventilation would help, if practical in the venue, lowering the risk to ~24 microcovids. [2]

Other considerations:

How risky is this event compared to what people are generally doing? Bars are open again, and have been for months, as is indoor dining. This sort of event is now fully legal here.

If we don't think it is currently ok but will be at some point, what would have to change? If the answer is that people who don't want to get vaccinated would have to get vaccinated, I don't think we should be waiting for them.

What is the current goal in limiting transmission? Essentially, everyone either needs to get vaccinated or get covid: there aren't really other options. So it seems to me that the main reasons to be cautious are making sure that we do not overwhelm the medical system, and allowing people who are at much higher than average risk to still meet the

...