trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Surface Thoughts Suck
by Dach — 2020-11-02T13:24:03.229Z

I've been thinking about the differences between the ways in which people typically pursue wealth and the ways in which people typically pursue their altruistic goals. Charity is significantly signalling, and so on... But, there's something else I noticed.

Whenever you want wealth, you pursue a high paying career, open a business, and so on. Whenever you (a hypothetical average person unfamiliar with the rationalist or effective altruism community) want to accomplish some altruistic goal, you're going to consider personally volunteering yourself to perform the associated cheap labor. If you decide to donate instead, you probably see it as the less impactful option. It would be better (you would think) to go to third world villages yourself than to donate to charity.

The underlying reason behind this mistake is the notion of topicality- proximity in an unconsciously constructed web of connections. Traditionally, different paths to power (business, government, personal charitable work, etc.) are associated with different usages. Volunteering is for helping starving children, private business is for making money, government work is for changing what the government does. This association is often valid- different types of power are better at accomplishing different goals.

It's less valid when those types of power are highly interchangeable. Imagine money and political power have a standardized rate of exchange in the vein of one US dollar per DemocracyCoin. It's either going to be better to acquire money to buy political power, or it's going to be better to acquire political power to buy money- manipulating the government isn't easier if you're a politician, and buying gold jewelry isn't easier if you're a business owner. One profession or the other is better at both.

In the case of standard employment (the trade of your man-hours for the money of others) and charity (the trade of your money for the man-hours of others), there are clear exchange rates. For obvious reasons, average westerners have a comparative advantage in money-making relative to the average human. Thus, westerners (usually) shouldn't directly volunteer their time to altruistic organizations which work in e.g. the third world; They should perform the two-step resource conversion of My Time -> Money -> Someone Else's Time.

More generally: In a big and complicated world where so many...
Should students be allowed to give good teachers a bonus?
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-11-02T00:19:54.578Z

Alice is a STEM student taking general chemistry, linear algebra, and intro to computer programming. At the end of her term, the school emails her an online form with a link to her

Student-Allocated Bonus.

For taking three classes, Alice gets 3 points. She can divide them up however she wants between her teachers from this quarter. Her favorite teacher was Prof. Bruin, her math teacher. Her least favorite teacher was Prof. Cameron, her computer programming teacher. Prof. Dorry, her chemistry teacher, was all right. She gives Prof. Bruin 2 points, Prof. Dorry 1 point, and Prof. Cameron 0 points.

Jack is her classmate, but he forgets to fill out the SAB form. The system divides his points equally, 1 per teacher.

Once the due date for submission has passed, the system totals up the points that students have allocated to each teacher. Each teacher gets $5 per point. It's a modest but not insignificant bonus. Prof. Bruin's 30 students award him 50 points, so he earns $250 extra. At the local college, teachers make about $3,000 per class, so that's an 8% bump in his earnings.

People were worried at first that this was basically the same thing as students bribing their teacher. What if Jack promises his math teacher that he'll give him all his points on the SAB in exchange for "going easy on his grading?"

The beauty of the anonymized points system is that it makes this impossible to verify. Which student gave which points to what teacher is anonymous. Since points can only be given in integers, students can't do any shenanigans like giving their teacher some weird decimal point number of points (2.6893 points) so that their teacher will see the decimal number and know who the money was from. And the SAB is assigned after all grades are due at the end of the quarter.

The SAB is a modest portion of the teacher's total salary. It's not a club that students can hold over a teacher's head. $5 is not a meaningful bribe. It's just one small but non-zero part of the incentive structure.

But it has some very attractive advantages.

Students are the consumers of the product schools are selling. They have at the very least an important role in evaluating its quality. Currently, they can only express their opinion before trying out a teacher's offering, by choosing whether or not to pay tuition for the class. Wouldn't it be better if at least some small fraction of their money was allo...
Zeno's Paradoxes
by Chris_Leong — 2020-11-01T23:39:14.767Z

Dichotomy Paradox

Imagine the following situation:

A runner is trying to run 1km. Before they can run 1km, then must run 0.5km. Before they can run 0.5km, they must run 0.25km. Before they can run 0.25km, they must run 0.125km and so on. This would require completing an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno claimed to be impossible.

This naturally divides the space into intervals:

0.5-1, 0.25-0.5, 0.125-0.25...

Note that Zeno assumes that an infinite number of non-overlapping space intervals can fit within a finite space. But he seems to doubt that an infinite number of non-overlapping time intervals can fit within a finite time. Why the asymmetry?

Archilles and the Tortoise Transformation Solution:

Suppose Achilles is in a foot race with a tortoise over 100m. By the time Archilles runs 100m, the tortoise has advanced a further 1m. By the time he has run the 1m, the tortoise has moved 1cm. By the time he runs the 1cm, the tortoise has moved 0.01cm, ect. Thus whenever Archilles has arrived where the tortoise was, he still has further distance to go

Direct Solution

(This is a better solution that I edited in)

If Achilles were to reach 200m, then given the speeds, the tortoise would be at 102m. If Archilles never reaches 200m, then we can conclude that a finite amount of space can be infinitely divided into intervals. This begs the question, why isn't time infinitely divisible into intervals as well? If we don't want an assymetry between space and time, then we'll accept this, which would mean there's no problem with an infinite number of intervals or instants occuring in a finite period of time. In fact, this will occur regardless of whether the arrow is at motion or rest.

Transformation Solution

(This was the original solution that I posted, but I now have a simpler one).

Let's simplify this and imagine that the tortoise moves half as fast as Archilles. To find when they intersect absent this paradox, let t be how far the tortoise has run and a be how far Archilles has run. So if they intersect, they would intersect at:

2t=a=t+100; that is t=100m, a=200m

Just to be absolutely clear, we haven't assumed that they actually intersect, just calculated where they will intersect if they do.

We can then transform the argument about Archilles always being behind the tortoise into one about Archilles never quite reaching the 200m. This then becomes almost equivalent to the previous par...
Automated intelligence is not AI
by KatjaGrace — 2020-11-01T23:30:01.715Z

Crossposted from world spirit sock puppet.

Sometimes we think of ‘artificial intelligence’ as whatever technology ultimately automates human cognitive labor.

I question this equivalence, looking at past automation. In practice human cognitive labor is replaced by things that don’t seem at all cognitive, or like what we otherwise mean by AI.

Some examples:

Early in the existence of bread, it might have been toasted by someone holding it close to a fire and repeatedly observing it and recognizing its level of doneness and adjusting. Now we have machines that hold the bread exactly the right distance away from a predictable heat source for a perfect amount of time. You could say that the shape of the object embodies a lot of intelligence, or that intelligence went into creating this ideal but non-intelligent tool.

Self-cleaning ovens replace humans cleaning ovens. Humans clean ovens with a lot of thought—looking at and identifying different materials and forming and following plans to remove some of them. Ovens clean themselves by getting very hot.

Carving a rabbit out of chocolate takes knowledge of a rabbit’s details, along with knowledge of how to move your hands to translate such details into chocolate with a knife. A rabbit mold automates this work, and while this route may still involve intelligence in the melting and pouring of the chocolate, all rabbit knowledge is now implicit in the shape of the tool, though I think nobody would call a rabbit-shaped tin ‘artificial intelligence’.

Human pouring of orange juice into glasses involves various mental skills. For instance, classifying orange juice and glasses and judging how they relate to one another in space, and moving them while keeping an eye on this. Automatic orange juice pouring involves for instance a button that can only be pressed with a glass when the glass is in a narrow range of locations, which opens an orange juice faucet running into a spot common to all the possible glass-locations.

Some of this is that humans use intelligence where they can use some other resource, because it is cheap on the margin where the other resource is expensive. For instance, to get toast, you could just leave a lot of bread at different distances then eat the one that is good. That is bread-expensive and human-intelligence-cheap (once you come up with the plan at least). But humans had lots of intelligence and not...
The Born Rule is Time-Symmetric
by lsusr — 2020-11-01T23:24:08.903Z

The Born rule states that if an observable of a particle in state |ψ⟩ with eigenvalues {λ1,λ2,…} is measured then the probability of yielding a particular eigenvalue λi equals |⟨λ|ψ⟩|2.

In quantum mechanics, time-reversal is performed by complex conjugation ψ→ψ∗. If we apply time-reversal to the Born rule then all the math stays the same except |ψ⟩ becomes |ψ∗⟩.

The mathematics for time-reversing the Born rule is straightforward complex algebra. I use the variable V to indicate an arbitrary vector of complex values {v1,v2,…}.

⟨V|V⟩=∑i|vi|2=∑i|v∗i|2=⟨V∗|V∗⟩

Consider the particular case ψ=V.

⟨ψ|ψ⟩=⟨ψ∗|ψ∗⟩(⟨ψ|ψ⟩)∗=(⟨ψ∗|ψ∗⟩)∗|ψ∗⟩⟨ψ∗|=|ψ⟩⟨ψ|⟨λ|ψ∗⟩⟨ψ∗|λ⟩=⟨λ|ψ⟩⟨ψ|λ⟩|⟨λ|ψ∗⟩|2=|⟨λ|ψ⟩|2

The Born rule is invariant under time reversal because |⟨λ|ψ⟩|2=|⟨λ|ψ∗⟩|2. The Born rule is time-symmetric because |⟨λ|ψ⟩|2 is invariant under time reversal. But what, intuitively, does it mean?

Alternate Histories

We traditionally think of the multiverse as several possible futures branching off of the present.

But we have just shown that the arrow can be reversed. All possible futures are also possible pasts.

Distinguishing past from future is a tricky problem when the set of possible futures equals the set of possible pasts.

The physics establishment sidesteps this quandary by defining time to progress in the direction of increasing entropy.

Entropy

An ontology O is an associative operator that buckets a set of microstates m={mi} into a smaller set of macrostates M={Mi}.

|m|>|M|O:m→M

The entropy of a state equals the natural log of its macrostatic degeneracy.

The entropy S of a macrostate Mi equals the natural log of the number of microstates in its bucket.

S(Mi)=ln|O−1Mi|

The entropy S of a microstate mi equals the natural log of the number of microstates in its bucket.

S(mi)=ln|O−1Omi|

The Random Walk of Time

The only thing you directly experience is this instant right now. The past and future are inferences. They are not empirical observations.

You are a classical being. Therefore your experience of this instant is a degenerate macrostate. A degenerate macrostate is a macrostate wi

...
Why are deaths not increasing with infections in the US?
by Tim Liptrot — 2020-11-01T22:43:42.686Z

According to COVID act now, cases are now up to 100k a day, from an average of 40k/day in early October. Two weeks ag case numbers were already up by 50%. Meanwhile the change in deaths has been modest, still around 10%. This would require a three week lag for deaths to be proportional to cases. What might be happening?
Cowering To Genocide: Uighur Persecution And The World’s Last Hope
by willbobaggins — 2020-11-01T21:01:07.494Z

If you could stop a genocide-would you?

In western China, right now, more than a million men, women, and children sit in reeducation camps. Mothers separated from children, forced marriages, forced sterilizations-Margaret Atwood’s fiction made a reality.

What’s to be done? Have we learned nothing? From Rwanda, from the Holocaust, from the Holodomor? The cat’s out of the bag, and the End of history is over. Finally, we can acknowledge that the future is not just greyed out liberal democracy, 2% a year GDP growth, easing ourselves into decadence. In reality, our dark 20th century never really left us after all.

Modernity and the belief in bad people are incompatible. The enlightenment has swept conflict under the rug and right out the Overton window. Hobbes, banished from the lexicon. To even conceive a world with people who are themselves, bad, is a heretical assumption. To understand the aspects of human nature that are deeply problematic is to understand the true nature of reality. American culture lulled to sleep by narcotics and video games, our senses dulled by ultra-palatable foods and 2-hour delivery. In some sense, things are better than they ever have been before; in another sense, they’re much worse. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Americans are depressed, fat, and lead lives bereft of meaning. We are reduced to larping real revolutionary change on the streets, with bats, shields, and batons. A simulacra of revolution, a cry for meaning in a world gone mad.

I recall a cool October night in 2018. Joe Biden spoke softly to a crowd I was a part of. Bathed in dim light, he rambled. He wove soft, slow, soliloquies on American Greatness. He remarked on the magnificence of our landmass. That we are surrounded by vast oceans, blessed by great mineral reserves, possessing unrivalled food production capability, the mightiest navy the world has ever seen. The Zeihan-Esque supposition? Geography is destiny. Our geopolitical rivals? Nothing to worry about. China-why worry about China… “c’mon man.”

This theory is seductive because it is easy. It’s a denial of agency-the idea that nothing can be done to challenge us. This makes our position precarious. You can’t fix problems you can’t see. If, like...
What is the right phrase for "theoretical evidence"?
by Adam Zerner — 2020-11-01T20:43:38.747Z

I mean "theoretical evidence" as something that is in contrast to empirical evidence. Alternative phrases include "inside view evidence" and "gears-level evidence".

I personally really like the phrase "gears-level evidence". What I'm trying to refer to is something like, "our knowledge of how the gears turn would imply X". However, I can't recall ever hearing someone use the phrase "gears-level evidence". On the other hand, I think I recall hearing "theoretical evidence" used before.

Here are some examples that try to illuminate what I am referring to.

Effectiveness of masks

Iirc, earlier on in the coronavirus pandemic there was empirical evidence saying that masks are not effective. However, as Zvi talked about, "belief in the physical world" would imply that they are effective.

Foxes vs hedgehogs

Consider Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “hedgehogs” (who rely more on theories, models, global beliefs) and “foxes” (who rely more on data, observations, local beliefs).
- Blind Empiricism

Foxes place more weight on empirical evidence, hedgehogs on theoretical evidence.

Harry's dark side

HPMoR chapter 10:

Then I won't do that again! I'll be extra careful not to turn evil!

"Heard it."

Frustration was building up inside Harry. He wasn't used to being outgunned in arguments, at all, ever, let alone by a Hat that could borrow all of his own knowledge and intelligence to argue with him and could watch his thoughts as they formed. Just what kind of statistical summary do your 'feelings' come from, anyway? Do they take into account that I come from an Enlightenment culture, or were these other potential Dark Lords the children of spoiled Dark Age nobility, who didn't know squat about the historical lessons of how Lenin and Hitler actually turned out, or about the evolutionary psychology of self-delusion, or the value of self-awareness and rationality, or -

"No, of course they were not in this new reference class which you have just now constructed in such a way as to contain only yourself. And of course others have pleaded their own exceptionalism, just as you are doing now. But why is it necessary? Do you think that you are the last potential wizard of Light in the world? Why must you be the one to try for greatness, when I have advised you that you are riskier than average? Let some other, safer candidate try!"

The Sorting Hat has empirical evidence that Harry is at risk of goin...
Notes on Compassion
by David Gross — 2020-11-01T19:10:00.504Z

This post examines the virtue of compassion. I hope to synthesize what others have learned, rather than giving my own opinions about it, though I’ve selected what I found interesting or credible according to my own inclinations. I wrote this not as an expert, but as someone who wants to learn. I hope it helps people who want to know more about compassion and how to improve in the practice of it.

What is compassion?

The literature about compassion includes a lot of hair-splitting about what it is: whether it is an emotion or a feeling or an affect or an attitude or a response, for instance.[1] Trying not to get too lost in the weeds, and acknowledging that there are differences of perspective that may be important in some contexts, here is my stab at it:

Compassion concerns our feelings and actions towards people who are suffering or unfortunate. It has three linked components:

Take notice of another person’s suffering.
Become motivated thereby to relieve that suffering.
Take action with the intent of relieving that suffering.

The first step requires that you become aware of the suffering, which may be a matter of luck (you happen upon someone who is obviously suffering) or one of skill (you discern through subtle signs in someone’s manner that they’re suffering, or you take pains to learn about obscure suffering taking place out of sight). This implicates the further virtues of curiosity, imagination, sensitivity, and sympathy as well as some complex cognitive skills involved in understanding another person’s needs, motives, and emotional states.

The second step distinguishes compassion from mere care-giving (of the sort a person might do professionally or out of duty, without necessarily doing it compassionately). In this step, learning about suffering triggers concern and an urge to relieve the suffering. In some people this happens quickly and subconsciously and seems almost automatic, the way smelling baked bread might make you hungry, or hearing James Brown might make you want to get up offa that thing. People who feel this way may say that they themselves suffer sympathetically with the original sufferer, and this may be part of the motivation for wanting to relieve them. If you feel upset at the suffering you see but are not motivated to relieve it, you may be experiencing “alarm” or “distress” but not the sort of concern that is likely to motivate you t...
Forecasting Newsletter: October 2020.
by NunoSempere — 2020-11-01T13:09:50.542Z

Highlights

Facebook's Forecast now out of out of beta.

British Minister and experts give probabilistic predictions of the chance of a Brexit deal.

CSET/Foretell publishes an issue brief on their approach to using forecasters to inform big picture policy questions.

Index

Highlights

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms

In The News

(Corrections)

Long Content

Hard To Categorize

Sign up here or browse past newsletters here. I'm considering creating a Patreon or substack for this newsletter; if you have any strong views, leave a comment.

Prediction Markets & Forecasting Platforms

Facebook's Forecast app now out of beta in the US and Canada.

Hypermind, a prediction market with virtual points but occasional monetary rewards, is organizing a contest for predicting US GDP in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Prizes sum up to $90k.

Metaculus held the Road to Recovery, and 20/20 Insight Forecasting contests. It and collaborators also posted the results of their 2020 U.S. Election Risks Ssurvey.

CSET publishes a report on using forecasters to inform big picture policy questions.

We illustrate Foretell’s methodology with a concrete example: First, we describe three possible scenarios, or ways in which the tech-security landscape might develop over the next five years. Each scenario reflects different ways in which U.S.-China tensions and the fortunes of the artificial intelligence industry might develop. Then, we break each scenario down into near-term predictors and identify one or more metrics for each predictor. We then ask the crowd to forecast the metrics. Lastly, we compare the crowd’s forecasts with projections based on historical data to identify trend departures: the extent to which the metrics are expected to depart from their historical trajectories.

Replication Markets opens their Prediction Market for COVID-19 Preprints. Surveys opened on October 28, and markets will open on November 11, 2020.

In the News

The European Union is attempting to build a model of the Earth at 1km resolution as a test ground for its upcoming supercomputers. Typical models run at a resolution of 10 to 100km.

Michael Gove, a British Minister, gave a 66% chance to a Brexit deal. The Independent follows up by giving the probabilities of different experts

Some 538 highlights:

US general election polls are generally a random walk, rather than having momentum.

Pollsters have made some

...