trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Would the world be a better place if we all agreed to form a world government next Monday?
by idontwanttodie — 2021-10-26T18:14:17.432Z

I want to maximize my chances of living forever by motivating humanity to immediately coordinate as a singleton society that agrees to rules enforced by a single world government.

Nation states and corporations are the most powerful entities in the world today. These groups have provided some of us with a standard of living that humans 500 years ago could not even imagine. But our prosperity came at the cost of things like war, corruption, and inequality. Our current planet has countries competing for resources and corporations competing for profits. This environment is not stable enough to handle our exponentially improving technological capabilities.

The world government I'm imagining:
* Grants all humans equal rights, acknowledging that we are all products of randomness. Defectors will not be punished, just isolated.
* Implements scalable solutions to provide post-scarcity standards of living for everyone.
* Performs controlled, iterative testing of competing ideas.
* Records all data about space and time in a single Global Database, open for anyone to read.
* Uses axiomatic logical reasoning to decide on laws. The axioms are maintained collectively. Laws are enforced using Global Database records as evidence.
* Uses energy lost to entropy as the fundamental currency of the economy. Profit does not exist.

We can spread ideas at the speed of light. The viability of unification could be gauged on the order of days with some sort of viral Internet campaign. What if everyone on Earth (with Internet access) answered the question: "would the world be a better place if we all agree to form a world government next Monday?". The viral campaign must be simple and easy to engage with in order to maximize the number of participants.

The hope is that when enough people agree that a singleton could be better than what we have right now, they can work together to peacefully self-organize. Perhaps start by developing the software system that allows our species to collaboratively converge on some moral axioms.

So, humans of Earth: Would the world be a better place if we all agreed to form a world government next Monday? Please elaborate.
Don't Use the "God's-Eye View" in Anthropic Problems. 
by dadadarren — 2021-10-26T13:47:53.386Z

This is another attempt to promote my solution to the anthropic paradoxes: Perspective-Based Reasoning. Partially motivated by Joe Carlsmith's series on SSA vs SIA.

SSA, SIA, and PBR

They are many ways to state SSA and SIA with equivalent effects on calculation. The following is just one version of it.

SSA: Treat yourself as a random sample of all actually existing (past, present, and future) observers in the reference class. It does not update on your own existence but favors situations where the fraction of observers with your epistemic situation is higher. E.g. "doom soon" in the doomsday argument.

SIA: Treat yourself as a random sample of all observers that could potentially exist. It considers your own existence more likely if there are more observers with your epistemic situation. So it updates on one's own existence and favors "big worlds" with more observers like you. E.g. presumptuous philosophers.

PBR: Do not start by thinking about "observers in my reference class" or "people in my epistemic situations". Instead directly start by recognizing "I am this person, living in this time". It is a datum that needs/has no logical explanation. PBR does not update on one's own existence, does not favor worlds with a higher fraction or higher number of observers in my epistemic situations.

There is no reason to "Who I am"

From each of us's natural first-person perspective, is there a logical explanation as to why I am this particular person instead of say, Bill Gates, a cow, a virus, or a neutron star? There is none. Yet that is the most fundamental fact I know of. I am this person because the only subjectivity available is due to it. I experience the world from its perspective.

From someone's perspective, the first-person "I" is inherently special. A twin does not need any information to differentiate himself from the other twin. Physical/epistemic similarities do not play any part in it. There is no "reference class" to the self at all.

Why do SSA and SIA feel so natural?

Because we are used to thinking from a god's-eye view. We like to conduct our reasoning "objectively": treating similar people with indifference. In most cases, this won't cause any problem. However, anthropic questions are formulated by using specific perspectives. The questions cannot be stated from the g...
Impressive vs honest signaling
by Adam Zerner — 2021-10-26T07:16:24.478Z

Epistemic status: Musings.

One thing that I am particularly happy with in my life is my girlfriend Alex. Here is the story of how we met.

I was 23 years old and had never had a girlfriend before. Heck, I never even dated. It's not that I wasn't interested. I was less interested than most, but I had some interest. I just didn't think I'd be able to find someone who I'm compatible with.

A friend of mine encouraged me to give Tinder a shot. I had been off and on about it. I had a few conversations but didn't really take it seriously and didn't spend much time with it. Then I had a job interview in Vegas, and I figured it could be fun to try meeting someone to date while I was there.

I went about it much differently from how others use Tinder. I mostly paid attention to the profile descriptions. Very few people actually wrote anything in their profiles. I wasn't interested in that. If you only write a sentence or two on your profile, I feel like that says something about either how deep you are, or, more charitably, what you're looking to get out of Tinder.

Anyway, I would swipe through, rejecting everyone who had these two sentence profiles. Then when people had longer profiles, I would skim them. If they weren't interesting, I'd reject. If they were, I'd read them in full, and then make a decision.

There weren't many people who I liked, but there were a few. Then when I came across Alex's profile, I was really excited. She had a somewhat long profile. It touched on rationality, self-improvement, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. And she was cute. So I super liked her.

To my surprise, she liked me back! I actually remember where I was. I was in the Luxor hotel. The one that looks like a pyramid and has that super powerful light beam that shoots up into the sky. I remember walking off to the side and writing out this really long message to her.

I talked about all of these wacky things that people don't talk about in initial messages to people you connect with on Tinder. Actually, my mind is fuzzy on the details. It definitely had a lot to do with how rationality and self-improvement is very important to me. And how I have crazy ideas of making a ton of money with startups and figuring out how to use that money to "save the world". I think I might have mentioned that I don't envision ever getting married or having kids.

To my surprise again, she messaged me back and was really int...
Effectiveness of Moderna booster shot and mix-and-match?
by warrenjordan — 2021-10-26T06:18:25.551Z

I read that the FDA has approved the Moderna booster shot as well as mix-and-match shots. I have two doses of Moderna and inclined to take a booster as Pfizer's booster showed 95.6% effectiveness in their Phase 3 trial.

Was wondering if any has substantial evidence or data on the Moderna booster shot and the mix-and-match shots? I'm eligible for it in a week and want to decide if I should get Moderna when it's available or mix with another booster.
Book Review: Being You by Anil Seth
by Alexander — 2021-10-26T05:44:10.865Z

Overview

Consciousness is "deeply inscribed into the wider patterns of nature."

This book is a good non-technical synopsis on the cutting edge of consciousness research. However, this book offers little new insight. Seth manages to represent all sides of the argument fairly without giving up on his adherence to physicalism. Through this book, it is apparent that Seth is a proponent of Embodied Cognition, the idea that our bodies—not just our brains as passive information processors—play a crucial role in forming our conscious experiences.

Remark: When talking about consciousness, adherence to physicalism is necessary. Information is fundamentally physical (refer to papers by R Landauer and D Deutsch). There is nothing magical about information, emotions, intuitions and consciousness. They all obey the laws of physics. DHCA is hard evidence against the existence of an immaterial soul that leaves the body after death:

Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA) is a surgical technique that induces deep medical hypothermia. It involves cooling the body to temperatures between 20 °C to 25 °C, and stopping blood circulation and brain function for up to one hour. It is used when blood circulation to the brain must be stopped because of delicate surgery within the brain, or because of surgery on large blood vessels that lead to or from the brain. DHCA is used to provide a better visual field during surgery due to the cessation of blood flow. DHCA is a form of carefully managed clinical death in which heartbeat and all brain activity cease."

This book might be frustrating to some readers because Seth is agnostic about several contentious open problems in the consciousness space, such as whether consciousness is substrate independent. Seth is prudent and reverent. I have seen many consciousness researchers treating the more outlandish hypotheses with ridicule, but he mostly remains agnostic as long as the jury is still out on the matter. Knowledge creation requires idea generation, not just idea judgement. Therefore, we should be more tolerant of the more outlandish ideas as long as there are no knock-down arguments or evidence against them.

This book covers the whole gamut of consciousness research. Seth covers topics ranging over:

Measuring consciousness
Integrated Information Theory
Free Energy Principle and Active Inference
Good Regulator Theorem
Embodied Cognition
Emotions
Se

...
No, really, can "dead" time be salvaged?
by Nicholas / Heather Kross — 2021-10-26T00:02:11.540Z

About a month ago, /u/batislu on /r/SlateStarCodex posted the question "How do you spend your "dead" time productively?". I read this thread, and found myself relieved (because of the admonitions to chill out), but also frustrated (because of the lack of real answers to the question).

With the urgency entailed by extinction risks etc., "just chilling" during dead time can (for many of us) feel undoable. Or, at least, undoable some of the time.

Assume, for many of us, our day job / school does little to directly help, at the highest levels, with the kinds of important problems discussed here. (This is a good time to remind everyone that these opinions are both hypothetical, and solely my own (not my employer's).)

Then the questions become:

What, if anything, can be done in the tired "between-time" after work?

Can it help with any of the following?:

Directly helping work on AI safety / global risks.

Upskilling quickly enough to contribute substantially to the previous thing.

Improving one's health/intelligence/financial independence enough to be in a better position (in the near term, like less than a year) to help with the first thing.

Some answers of the format and specificity being looked for here:

"Join this org's Discord and critique their ideas, if you find argument/feedback a relaxing/low-stress activity."

"Do 1 small unit of this easily-spit-uppable low-chance-of-getting-stuck MOOC per day."

"Find a type of exercise, like X Y or Z, that you find fun, and do that once per day."

"Here's a list of activities many people I know find productive and relaxing, see if any apply to you: ..."

Note that the goal is not to replace all of one's dead time with something productive (unless it's possible to do without crashing and burning lol).

The goal is to keep moving forward at things that would realistically help solve important problems. (Then our guilt/anxiety will be assuaged enough to actually enjoy/recharge the rest of our dead time.)
Mental health benefits and downsides of psychedelic use in ACX readers: survey results
by RationalElf — 2021-10-25T22:55:09.522Z

Over the last few years, I’ve had a lot of conversations with people in the rationalist and adjacent communities about psychedelic use, mainly focused on potential benefits, potential risks, and good and bad outcomes they’ve seen in others from using psychedelics. I often wished I had more hard data about this, and that it came from groups that seemed more analogous to people in the rationalist and nearby communities than eg the average taker of existing surveys on psychedelics. So I decided to run a survey on this on the recent

ACX reader survey

, and am sharing the results here. (I’m posting this using an anonymous username, but I’ve been around the community for a long time.)

Many thanks to Scott and all the survey-takers for making this happen!

Meta

You can see a blank copy of the survey

here

. It might be worth making some advance predictions about answers to the questions in it before looking at the stats below.
824 people took the survey and seemed like they’d done one of the drugs I was asking about (LSD, psilocin/psilocybin/magic mushrooms, chemical DMT without an accompanying MAOI, mescaline/mescaline cacti, Ayahuasca or “pharmahuasca” (DMT + an MAOI), + a write in option) in doses larger than a microdose (also, someone noted that I incorrectly referred to these as psychedelic tryptamines). (There were originally 986 responses, but Scott directed psychedelic users to take the survey, so it isn’t surprising that most had done psychedelics). I discarded the responses from people who hadn’t done one of the relevant drugs, and did my best in ambiguous cases.
I’m not very experienced with large survey and data analysis, so even though the things I did seemed pretty straightforward and I tried to double-check and sanity check the most important parts, I think there’s still a reasonable chance I made some meaningful mistakes that undermine my results

Summary of high-level takeaways

More psychedelic trips are reported to be good than bad (depending on how you count it, there are about 5x-11x as many good as bad trips).
Psychedelics are very good for some people (according to those people), e.g. among the best experiences in their lives. Specifically, 74% said a psychedelic trip was in the top 20 most enjoyable experiences of their life, 61% said a trip was in the top 20 most meaningful experiences, but also very bad for a smaller number of people (

...
Child Walksheds
by jefftk — 2021-10-25T21:00:06.347Z

Roads are the biggest limitation on mobility for our older kids, now
that we're using

walkie-talkies. Anna
(5y) can't cross the street on her own, because she is not quite
reliable enough at checking for cars. For her, the neighborhood is
a collection of islands:

With assistance she can move between them, but otherwise she's pretty
limited.

Lily (7y) is better at crossing streets, and we let her cross
specific low-traffic intersections. Here they are, in red:

You can see that this opens up the neighborhood dramatically. She can
walk to school (reduces conflict
when Anna is slow to get ready) and visit friends (~8 of them).

On the other hand, there are still many nearby places they really want
to go and can't, because the streets involved are too dangerous. I think
the next stage will be learning how to cross at the crosswalk marked
below, which opens up the community
path, park,
and more friends:

Right now we deal with this by just being pretty willing to help them
cross that street. It's also possible that some of this will get
better with the speed humps they are planning to install in our
neighborhood soon.

Comment via: facebook
The Roots of Progress events in Austin, November 4–6
by jasoncrawford — 2021-10-25T16:12:14.414Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/austin-events-november-2021

I’ll be in Austin, TX in November for a few events:

Talk on nuclear power

“The Energy of Tomorrow: The Promise, Failure, and Possible Rebirth of Nuclear Power”:

In the 1950s, nuclear power was seen as the energy of the future. Today, it is stagnating on the sidelines, providing only 10% of world electricity, with no fundamental advance in reactor design for several decades. Why did this technology seem so incredibly promising, how did it go so badly wrong, and is there hope for a nuclear renaissance? This talk will demystify nuclear power, explaining how it works and why it deserves development instead of neglect.

When: Thursday, November 4, 7:00pm

Where: UT Austin, Rowling Hall (RRH) 4.408

Community meetup

Co-hosted with Austin LessWrong. I’ll talk for a few minutes about progress studies, followed by discussion. Light snacks provided; cash bar.

When: Saturday, November 6, 1:30pm (normal Austin LW meetup time)

Where: The Front Page Pub, 1023 Springdale Road (NOT the normal Austin LW meetup location)

RSVP: Please let us know here if you plan to make it; not required but it will help us plan.
Postmodern Warfare
by lsusr — 2021-10-25T09:02:34.420Z

Nobody designing a financial system today would invent credit cards. The Western world uses credit cards because replacing legacy systems is expensive. China doesn't use credit cards. They skipped straight from cash to WeChat Pay. Skipping straight to the newest technology when you're playing catch-up is called leapfrogging.

A world-class military takes decades to create. The United States' oldest active aircraft carrier was commissioned in 1975. For reference, the Microsoft Windows operating system was released in 1985. The backbone of NATO's armed forces was designed for a world before autonomous drones and machine learning.

The United States dominates at modern warfare. Developed in WWII, modern warfare combines tanks, aircraft, artillery and mechanized[1] infantry to advance faster than the enemy can coordinate a response.

Modern warfare is expensive—and not just because of all that heavy machinery. Modern warfare delegates important decisions to the smallest unit capable of making them. Officers must be smart and they must be trained. Training officers to fight a modern war is hard. It takes a long time. There's constant turnover. It's a human resources nightmare. You can't just throw money at the problem.

Soon it will be possible to throw machine learning at the problem instead.

At the center of [China's] public discussions is a new and little-understood concept called “intelligentization (智能化),” which represents a new goal for the PLA’s progress in modernization…. Chinese theorists’ discussions about intelligentization overwhelmingly call for highly centralized decision-making structures. These strategists want operational commanders advised by advanced algorithms to perfectly direct intelligent swarms of autonomous battle systems to achieve campaign objectives. Chinese theorists believe this approach will consolidate command responsibility onto a few generals who can remain safely away from the frontlines of the battlefield, which is antithetical to the modern concept of mission command.

―Schrodinger’s Military? Challenges for China’s Military Modernization Ambitions

AI-centric postmodern warfare has advantages over human-centric modern warfare.

Human communication is a bottleneck for large organizations. Computer command systems can coordinate perfectly and instantly. Human beings cannot.

It's easier to mass-produce computers than human specialists.

A

...
Dating profiles from first principles: heterosexual male profile design
by Xodarap — 2021-10-25T03:23:09.292Z

Update: I improved the profile of someone who reached out to me from this article. They went from zero matches in a year to ~2/week.

I think this is roughly the effect size one should expect from following this advice: it's not going to take you from the 5th percentile to the 95th, but you can go from the 20th to the 70th or something.

Executive Summary

While romantic preferences are idiosyncratic, certain attributes are widely considered attractive by heterosexual women. The evidence for this is particularly strong in populations frequently studied by psychologists (i.e. psychology undergraduate students).
My general advice is to consider these frequently-desired attributes and orient your profile towards signaling that you are at least average in each of them. They are: aesthetics, mental health, social capital, wealth, physical attractiveness, and niceness.
There is some evidence that women are risk-averse rather than expectation maximizing, i.e. it's more important to indicate that you are at least acceptable on each of these dimensions than it is to indicate that you are exceptional on one of them.

If you only have two minutes

If you only have 2 minutes, I would suggest the following exercise:

Imagine it's after your first date. Your date goes home and texts her group chat "you won't believe it but I met the most amazing guy! He _____." What's that thing she is so excited about? Make sure that thing is immediately visible from your profile.

Epistemic Confidence

Part of why I'm writing this is that I think people are terrible at dating by default, so even mediocre advice is likely to make them better. I do not claim that this advice will make any man more attractive to any woman, but do think it's quite likely to make the median man more attractive to the median woman.

I have had writing this article on my to-do list for a while, and decided that I would never actually write it if every claim was individually cited. Instead, I am including a list of all works that I've drawn on at the bottom. It's important to emphasize that I think this information is more helpful than not to the median straight man, but psychology research is often not that rigorous (I somewhat recently found out that a paper I frequently mentioned had some of its major claims retracted), and even when it's good there is simply so much human variation that it's hard to make universal claims...