trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Empathetic vs Intrinsic Oof
by Ronny Fernandez — 2020-08-24T00:12:07.737Z

Crossposted from Figuring Figuring.

Some people are empathetic oofers, and some people are intrinsic oofers. (“Oof” as in the sound one makes when told a story about someone’s unintentional, but unfortunate gaffe.) Empathetic oofers, like myself, only experience awkwardness if they think someone else around them might be feeling awkward. Intrinsic oofers can feel awkward, or cringe, or other related things, even if they know for sure nobody else around them feels that way.

Empathetic oofers do this thing that drives intrinsic oofers crazy. The way we deal with awkward situations is creating common knowledge about how we feel about the awkwardness inducing situation, and asking others to do the same. An overly simplified model of this explains why that strategy makes sense if everybody in the room is an empathetic oofer.

If Alice and Bob are the only ones in the room, and they are both empathetic oofers, and they both know that the other is an empathetic oofer, but they do not know that they both know, then they will both feel awkward.

Alice will know that Bob will only feel awkward if he does not know that Alice does not feel awkward, but she does not know if Bob knows that Alice is also an empathetic oofer, so she does not know that Bob does not feel awkward, and so she in fact feels awkward. The same argument switching “Alice” and “Bob” shows that Bob feels awkward.

Now suppose that Alice and Bob are the only ones in the room, they both know that the other is an empathetic oofer, and they both know that they both know. Like before, Alice knows that Bob will only feel awkward if he does not know that Alice does not feel awkward, but she also knows that Bob knows that Alice will not feel awkward unless she does not know that Bob does not feel awkward, so she doesn’t have to worry about Bob worrying that she might feel awkward for some other reason, but since they don’t have common knowledge, she doesn’t know if Bob knows that he doesn’t have to worry about that! This means she doesn’t know that Bob doesn’t feel awkward, and so she feels awkward.

This reasoning gets hard to write about in English, but I promise the recursion goes all the way up the chain if they have common knowledge, and ends up bottoming out in neither of them feeling awkward, ...
Charting Is Mostly Superstition
by gilch — 2020-08-23T20:26:15.474Z

Part 6 of the Inefficient Markets sequence.

[I am not your financial advisor!
For educational purposes only.
Read part 1 first.]

The technical analyst reads the signs and portends and divines the future prices.
Three black crows are a bad omen, don'tcha know.
An abandoned baby is a sign of changes coming.
The morning star doji means the Fates are smiling.

Candlestick patterns! Trendlines! MACD's! Bollinger Bands! Stochastics!
There are dozens and dozens of these so-called "technical indicators".
Your stockbroker's trading software is probably full of them.
They all sound very arcane and financial.
Many of them have tunable parameters.

Do you know what the right parameters are?
Do you know what the signs and portends mean?

Neither do they.

Maybe some of this stuff used to work.
Some of it may be self-fulfilling prophecy.
(Ichimoku charts only work in Japan for some reason.)

Maybe if you stare at enough charts,
memorize enough patterns,
some day it will all click.

Some traders seem to think that way.
They may even think they're making progress.
I'd call it confirmation bias.

There is something to some of this,
but you're not quantifying it.
What parameters? Why? How big is your edge?

Stop thinking like a diviner,
and start thinking like a data scientist.

How to Chart Like a Quant

I'm not going to say that you never look at a price chart
(although I have heard that said),
it does tell you some things at a glance.

But as trading styles go,
collecting directional alpha in a single asset is hard mode.
And people think they can do it using a gut feel for signs and portends?

Really?

We kind of have to start with a single asset,
because it's hard to explain how to chart a pair without explaining how to chart a single asset first,
but we do want to be able to compare the relative performance of assets later on.

Share price is not the same as market cap.
It's as much about how many shares were issued,
and how often it split as about how well the company performed.

Comparing two assets on share price is apples-to-oranges.
It's just useless for our purposes.

Even comparing the recent prices to past prices is not that helpful.
Is Apple the same company it was in the '80s?
Different market, different CEO, different employees (mostly).
And different share price.

If you want to make money,
you don't care so much about where it was,
but how it moves.

Think velocity and acceleration,
not positi...
Postel’s Principle as Moral Aphorism
by  — 2020-08-23T19:36:40.800Z

[All the usual disclaimers. Wanders dangerously close to moral relativism. Cross-posted from Grand, Unified, Empty.]

I.

Postel’s Principle (also known as the Robustness Principle) is an obscure little guideline somewhat popular among computer programmers, in particularly those working on network protocols. The original goes like this:

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

My parents were both computer programmers, as am I, and my first job as a programmer was working on network protocols, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that I ran across this principle a long, long time ago. I suspect I heard it while still a teenager, before finishing high school, but I honestly don’t remember. Suffice to say that it’s been kicking around my brain for a long time.

As a rule of thumb in computer programming, Postel’s Principle has some basic advantages. You should be conservative in what you do because producing output that isn’t strictly compliant with the specification risks other programs being unable to read your data. Conversely, you should be liberal in what you accept because other programs might occasionally produce non-compliant data, and ideally your program should be robust and keep working in the face of data that isn’t quite 100% right.

While in recent years the long-term effects of Postel’s Principle on software ecosystems have led to some pushback, I’m more interested in the fact that Postel’s Principle seems to apply as well just as well as a moral aphorism as it does in programming. Context matters a lot when reading, so here’s a list of other aphorisms and popular moral phrases to get your brain in the right frame:

What would Jesus do?
Actions speak louder than words.
If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Be conservative in what you do, and liberal in what you expect from others.

II.

I am, by nature, a fairly conservative person. I’m also, whether by nature or past experience, somewhat socially subordinate; I’m usually much happier in a secondary position than in any role of real authority, and my self-image tends to be fairly fragile. The manosphere would happily write me off as a “beta male”, a...
How to set up foot pedals
by jefftk — 2020-08-23T16:40:06.052Z

Let's say you would like to control your computer partly with your
feet: how do you go about it? This wasn't something that I was
especially interested in before my

wrists
started hurting, but now I have it set up I like it a lot and I
would definitely keep it even if my wrists were completely better. I
have three pedals, set for scroll down, scroll up, and "archive this
email message and take me to the next unread message." You could
possibly use foot controls for different things in different programs,
but I haven't gotten into that.

I got a cheap no-name
three pedal foot switch for $35 shipped. I suspect it's not the most
durable option, but it's cheap enough that if it breaks I can easily
replace it. It comes with (useless-to-me) Windows-only software to
program it, but out of the box the three foot switches send a,
b, and c. I installed the open source tool
Karabiner-Elements
to remap them. First I needed to tell Karabiner to only affect the
foot pedals:

USB vendor id 1452 (0x5AC) is Apple, so I could tell that the foot pedal
was the remaining device. Then I needed to configure what I want it to
happen:

The reason for using open square bracket ([) is that it's
the gmail keyboard shortcut for "archive this email message and take
me to the next unread message."

By itself this is definitely not enough to make my wrists happy again,
but it takes a substantial load off them, and lets me handle my email
mostly hands-free. If I had a one-off repetitive task I needed to do,
I would consider setting up a temporary remapping just for that task.
At some point I also might consider setting up something to let me use
this hardware to control my rhythm stage
setup.

Comment via: facebook
SlateStarCodex Online Meetup: Dr David Manheim on Cooperation for AI
by JoshuaFox — 2020-08-23T10:00:47.127Z
Link: https://forms.gle/GQ4hrjFakzrsGZc49

On August 30, 17:30 GMT, 20:30 IDT, 10:30 PDT, Dr David Manheim will speak on "Cooperation for AI: From formal models in AI safety to geopolitics".

He will discuss multiagent dynamics, and also competition and race dynamics for AI takeoff safety.

David is a researcher with the University of Haifa, who works with Future of Humanity Institute and other organizations on investigating large-scale risks to humanity.

Read his related paper here.

Sign up here and we'll send you a link to the online meetup
[Geo: California/Bay Area] Mini-Research of 2020 Fire Situation
by Ruby — 2020-08-23T05:13:03.899Z

Last Updated: 2020/8/25 17:29 PDT

California currently has a lot of fire. It's not good. Some friends on a FB thread (public) were wondering whether this implied we should be doing something, e.g., leaving town. I've put in 1-2 hours of research now, and will probably do a bit more.

Notable background from the thread:

Hypothesis that the reduced number of inmate firefighters, due to Covid, means that this year could be much worse.
Cities are unlikely to burn due to being built with flame-proof materials.

Instead of posting further updates to that Facebook thread, I'm going to make them primarily here. If you're following here from that thread, you can make an account and subscribe to this post and get emailed if I (or someone else) comments with more updates.
This isn't world-class, super-rigorous research. Just me sharing the results of some basic Googling and Wikipedia reading. Very casual.

Friday, August 21st

I did some Googling and reading, most of Wikipedia, during a long Zoom meeting today.

From a 0.5-1 hour search, this year isn't obviously going to be much worse than prior years. I was worried when one of the news articles above said last year 260k acres burnt, and this past few days we've already seen 400k burn, but actually, last year was on the very low end (see image). 2018 was the largest fire year to date and that was 1.9M acres [1].

UPDATE: Well now 2020 is already at 1.4M and it's only August...

Re firefighters: Ben Goldhaber got the number from the NYT article saying 1500/9,400 = 16% were inmates. A 2018 document from Cal Fire has it at 3500/12,200 = 29% [2]. I could see the inmate firefighters either being more or less valuable on the margin. As someone said elsethread, maybe they get used in riskier situations to greater effect, or actually, they're less well trained and get less access to the equipment like helicopters so their actual contribution is less than their proportion of the whole. I suspect the latter.

There's yet another question of how much of a difference firefighting makes. Turns out it's hard to estimate/measure. I found one detailed paper [3] looking at metrics and methodology, but my quick read didn't leave me with a strong sense of how helpful firefighting is. Maybe a factor of 2? My guess is the loss of firefighting power is on the same order of magnitude as a bunch of other variables that affect outcomes, but I'm not s...
Current guidance for COVID-19 self-care?
by knite — 2020-08-23T02:10:55.998Z

What is the current consensus on supplements to take or skip? I thought zinc lozenges and high dose Vitamin C were clear winners, but I am now finding conflicting information on how Vitamin C may impact interferon.

There's also the HCQ issue, where it's been so politicized that it's rather difficult to determine efficacy as an early intervention.

Edit: The internet exists, I have no plans to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma and go shopping in person.

Asking for myself, because, well, y'know. Getting tested tomorrow, and regarding that - come on San Francisco, it's nearly September, DO BETTER. Please DM if you know of a way to get tested with a <24 hour turnaround time.
A trick for Safer GPT-N
by Razied — 2020-08-23T00:39:31.197Z

To clarify definitions a bit, by GPT-N I mean a future deep learning model trained to minimize the error of next-word prediction on a corpus that includes substantial portions of the internet. This model is assumed to be superhuman at its given task. There are only 2 requirements on the model necessary for the trick to work: #1. Needs to be trained with something like gradient descent, or otherwise have a clear mean of learning from a single example. #2. Needs to predict the probability of arbitrary text samples.

The general idea is the following: you can make GPT-N model humanity having access to its outputs by adding its outputs to its dataset and training on them. This allows us to use GPT-N's immense knowledge to predict the consequences of us having its output to a question. A practical process for using this to make safer GPT-N is something like this:

Setup the API to the model such that for every query you want to make of the AI, you make GPT-N predict a continuation without showing you, then you train it on that continuation (basically making it think that what it produced was already available to humanity). Then you ask it to predict the likelihood of various doom-implying headlines from a major newspaper in the 2040s, if training on the continuation to your query makes the likelihood of doom headlines greater, then the AI doesnt publish the continuation to your question.

The question of ensuring safety is then rephrased to building a corpus of text that we expect to reliably indicate positive vs negative outcomes of humanity. If we have such a corpus, we can have a system that causes GPT-N to only show answers that cause the good outcomes and avoid the bad ones, crucially without it trying to cause either, no direct optimization pressure is being applied to causing these outcomes, it's still producing the most likely text continuation, but we're using its knowledge to know whether we should look at its answers. There is some optimization pressure being applied to steering the future: we still have the at most 1bit/question decision of showing vs not-showing an answer, and that is quite unavoidable if we want to actually have any impact on the future.

This is an extremely cheap thing to implement, no additional fancy algorithms or breakthroughs required, so AI leaders get no measurable capability penalty from using this. The corpus of text indicat...
Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!
by Zack_M_Davis — 2020-08-23T00:36:43.740Z

How is it possible to tell the truth?

I mean, sure, you can use your larynx to make sound waves in the air, or you can draw a sequence of symbols on paper, but sound waves and paper-markings can't be true, any more than a leaf or a rock can be "true". Why do you think you can tell the truth?

This is a pretty easy question. Words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings, but intelligent systems can learn associations between a symbol and things in the world. If I say "dog" and point to a dog a bunch of times, a child who didn't already know what the word "dog" meant, would soon get the idea and learn that the sound "dog" meant this-and-such kind of furry four-legged animal.

As a formal model of how this AI trick works, we can study sender–receiver games. Two agents, a "sender" and a "receiver", play a simple game: the sender observes one of several possible states of the world, and sends one of several possible signals—something that the sender can vary (like sound waves or paper-markings) in a way that the receiver can detect. The receiver observes the signal, and makes a prediction about the state of the world. If the agents both get rewarded when the receiver's prediction matches the sender's observation, a convention evolves that assigns common-usage meanings to the previously and otherwise arbitrary signals. True information is communicated; the signals become a shared map that reflects the territory.

This works because the sender and receiver have a common interest in getting the same, correct answer—in coordinating for the signals to mean something. If instead the sender got rewarded when the receiver made bad predictions, then if the receiver could use some correlation between the state of the world and the sender's signals in order to make better predictions, then the sender would have an incentive to change its signaling choices to destroy that correlation. No convention evolves, no information gets transferred. This case is not a matter of a map failing to reflect the territory. Rather, there just is no map.

How is it possible to lie?

This is ... a surprisingly less-easy question. The problem is that, in the formal framework of the sender–receiver game, the meaning of a signal is simply how it makes a receiver update its probabilities, which is determined by the conditions under which the signal is sent. If I say "dog" and four-fifths of the t...
Why don't countries, like companies, more often merge?
by Vishrut Arya — 2020-08-22T23:56:42.527Z

Whereas companies often undergo a friendly merger or acquisition, why don't countries more often do this? Set aside colonialism because I'd like to focus on the case where the threat of violence is not paramount.

I suppose the right incentives aren't in place but is this an intrinsic fact of international relations or democratic politics?

For example, a merger between the US and Mexico seems, naively, like it could be in both nations' interest. The US gets more land and lower-cost labor and Mexico gets access to better governance and knowledge spillover.
Efficient Market Frontier
by Alexei — 2020-08-22T23:52:06.063Z

Recently I gave a talk on EMH: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3TiEZzw4ikneLGp4J/dissolving-the-is-the-efficient-market-hypothesis-dead

In there I had a bonus slide about what I call "Efficient Market Frontier" (EMF). In this post I want to expand on EMF, since I feel like a lot of disagreements and conversations around EMH and the market in general can be helped with this.

But first I hope you read my previous post: "The Holy Grail" of portfolio management. The importance of uncorrelated strategies will play an important part here.

Also, by request, here's a quick recap of most technical terms I use in this post:

Market: the set of things you're trading.
Backtest: see how your strategy would have performed historically by simulating it on relevant data.
Liquidation: losing all your money (but for certain specific reasons not relevant here)
Short(ing): betting on the asset price going down.
Limit order: you commit to buying if the price goes sufficiently low. If the price never goes that low, your order is not filled. (The flip side is selling if the price goes sufficiently high.)

The market is a game

I also want to reiterate an important assumption I've made in my talk. It will no doubt color my post and I think it might be somewhat contentious, so better state it upfront.

I think fundamentally the market is a game. You're in it to make money. At the end of the day you can have all the theory and correct pricing and best backtested strategies, but if the market "mistakenly" decides Zoom Technologies stock should go up, and you short it because "haha the market is so wrong" and get liquidated as more "mistaken" investors pile on... Well, then it seems like you lost that game.

In this view the primary reason to predict a "correct" price of anything is because it will help you make profitable trades. It's not because you believe that Tesla is worth $350.09B.

How do you play the game?

Your strategy is how you play the game. I'll define a strategy as an algorithm made of three parts: trigger, positioning and exit.

(You can and should, of course, run multiple strategies. How they interact together was covered my previous post. For now let's focus on just one strategy.)

Trigger: this is what makes you consider a trade in the first place. If you have an automated algorithm that runs ever...
Tagging Progress at 100%! (Party & Celebratory Talk w/ Jason Crawford, Habryka on Sun, Aug 30th, 12pm PDT)
by Ruby — 2020-08-22T16:45:32.192Z

Tagging Open Call / Discussion

There will be an online Tagging Progress Bar Completion Talk + Party on Sunday, August 30th at 12:00PM PDT. We'll start with a public conversation between Oliver Habryka (LW team lead) and Jason Crawford (author of Roots of Progress) on the topic of intellectual progress, followed by a freeform party in Gather.town or Topia.

--

Probabilities can't be 100%, but progress bars can be.

I am delighted to announce the Tagging Progress Bar which has graced the LessWrong front page for three weeks is now gloriously full. Every post with over 25 karma now has at least one tag applied to it, most having several.

Top among of the goals of tagging was to explicitly shape LessWrong more towards long-term intellectual progress: with a major pass at tagging the archives completed, it is now vastly easier to see what LessWrong has discussed over the years, find things you didn't know to search for, locate posts based on interest rather than recency or karma, catch-up on everything said on a topic to date, and generally continue the conversation on topics not currently on the frontpage.

Authors and commenters will hopefully now post to LessWrong secure in the knowledge that their posts and comments will not be forgotten after a week or two. Instead, the best content on each topic will be discoverable for years to come.

Thank you, taggers!!

An enormous shout-out goes out the tagging contributors. Everyone who tagged posts, created tags, wrote tag descriptions, voted tags, or just offered feedback. Tagging is not something the LessWrong team could have rolled out on our own, we needed your help and all users of the tagging system are indebted to you.

The Tag Numbers

To give you a sense of what was accomplished, here are some basic numbers (as of publishing):

14,028 tags applied
7,427 posts have been tagged
419 active tags created

Top Taggers

The tagging system doesn't yet have good recognition and reward systems in place, so unfortunately these taggers haven't gotten the karma they deserve. Still, everyone should know these are the folks whose efforts brought us success.

Top Tag Appliers

Multicore
Kaj_Sotala
Gyrodiot
Yoav Ravid
abramdemski
TurnTrout
Zack_M_Davis

Top Tag Creators & Description Writers

Kaj_Sotala
Yoav Ravid
Multicore
brook

As thanks, these top taggers will each receive the professionally-edited, physical five-book set of posts from the 20...