trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Ukraine Post #6: More Data and Peace Terms
by Zvi — 2022-03-25T18:20:01.445Z

I was mostly happy with the Covid-style approach I tried out last time. This is an update of ‘all the things worth noting since then’ but excluding prediction markets. I plan to do a prediction market update next, and keep those two tracks distinct. I do talk a bit about how I would characterize various final settlements, with an aim of getting prediction markets that can better reflect the nature of the final outcome.

Note that there is also an essentially endless list of claims of Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity, and I’m almost entirely not including them. You do not need me to tell you about this aspect of what is going on.

Lots of detail keeps coming in, and there are many incremental changes and updates, but the central facts seem similar to how they seemed as of my last post, so I won’t be re-summarizing them. Things are no longer moving quite so fast.

Potential Donations

From Bloomberg on March 15, an economist talks about fighting for Ukraine.

Here is the money quote, file under Huge If True (but I can’t evaluate it).

We don’t need food or paper towels. What the army needs is munitions and people need medical supplies, specific medical supplies. Most people die from blood loss after a cluster bomb or after some kind of ballistic missile falls. There may be 20 or 200 people wounded. It’s a little bit like when an airplane cabin loses pressure, the masks fall down — and what you need to do is to put the mask on yourself and then help others. So in this case, the mask analogy is a medical kit, which allows you to stop bleeding. So you really have to ensure that you are not bleeding, and then that people next to you are not bleeding.

So you have to have a lot of these medical kits, and they usually cost 10 or 20 bucks. But now of course they cost 100 bucks because it’s surge pricing and no one can deliver. So we are trying to focus on this specifically. Civilian authorities need them and even railroads are asking for these medical kits because evacuation trains get shelled and people die without this specific kit. We will deliver them. We have connections, there’ll be no [extra overhead charges]. It doesn’t get stolen on the way. And [your donation] is also tax deductible in the U.S. So for $100, you’ll save a life and get your taxes back.

There is a catch. It’s not so easy to actually get things where they need be.

And you

...
Duels & D.Sci March 2022: It's time for D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-data!
by aphyer — 2022-03-25T16:55:48.486Z

This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.

STORY (skippable)

You may have experienced a meteoric rise to be the billionaire CEO of DataCorp, but you can still enjoy the finer things in life. Like children's card games.

The world-famous gaming company 'Sorcerers of the Shore' is about to release a new card game, supposedly based upon the 'Ancient Sumerian Game of Shadows'. They're holding an opening tournament next week, and you mean to attend.

Rumors that the game absorbs the souls of its players, and can destroy them if they lose, are obvious nonsense. That strange lady who appeared in your DataCorp office out of a cloud of mist and warned you that 'you unleash a power beyond your comprehension' was a transparent con artist. You're not sure how she got in past your security unnoticed, or how she got back out afterwards, but you don't have time to worry about that! You need to submit your deck list for the opening tournament!

Unfortunately, the Sorcerers of the Shore have been very tight-lipped about the whole thing. They haven't actually published the ruleset of the game, only the names of cards available for you to select from. (They said something about how you should select 'the cards that call out to your soul.' This is also clearly nonsense. You don't want cards your soul is somehow compatible with. You want cards that will win.)

Fortunately, the ruleset is apparently 'unchanged from the ancient Sumerian game', and so you have funded a series of archeological expeditions to look for records of past plays of this game. (Is this a good use of your DataCorp billions? Of course! This is Serious Business!)

Your expeditions have come back with...quite impressive results, actually. Apparently they've uncovered a wider Ancient Sumerian civilization than anyone anticipated, with more advanced technology than anyone expected. The archeological community is fascinated, but more importantly for you, you've uncovered a very large dataset of games. Apparently this game was used by the Sumerians for a wide variety of things - there are records of it being used for gambling, divination, as a justice system in trials, and app...
Contextual Self
by ACrackedPot — 2022-03-25T15:39:23.152Z

Aella writes about how contextual pride is. Her primary focus is on pride, but shame comes up, as well. A quick refresher of the concept - this is not a summary, and you will lose information if you use only this description: Pride is a sense of relative superiority to a relevant context.

Morality gets contextualized a lot too. In that case I believe it is a problem, if only because the context keeps changing, and the way we approach morality isn't very good.

Identity is a type of context.

Context, in the sense I am using it here, is an implicit comparison between yourself and an external measure; archetypes are a type of context, for example. We tend to define ourselves considerably by what is, in fact, merely the context for our existence. A substantial portion of complaints in society come down to being contextualized in a manner the complainant finds unacceptable, or for others establishing a context which the complainant doesn't regard as reasonable.

I'm more interested in the way people compare themselves. As the article on morality may suggest, I am opposed to this form of contextualization; the arguments I'll advance here are going to be more general, however, because I think morality is sufficiently specific as to require specific arguments.

Social Status in a Decreasingly Contextual Society

One of the characteristics of the "Loser" subgroup in Rao's The Gervais Principle is that they find things they are good at, relative to their local context, to root their pride in. This works better on television than it generally works in real life; the guitarists I know all think they're crap, because there's a guy on YouTube who is way better than they are.

The internet has expanded our local context - which, given the nature of context, has meant that it has eliminated a lot of context; it's easier to find a group of people like you, who have your interests, but a side effect of this, which I think hasn't gotten much attention yet, is that it has become increasingly difficult to feel like you're good at the things you have an interest in.

Context, in the sense I describe it here, is increasingly bad for you, as a person, in a society in which context is increasingly universal. It fundamentally changes the game you are playing. I can, at this moment, message people are are better than me, at anything I choose. &n...
Chesterton’s Fence vs The Onion in the Varnish
by Joel Burget — 2022-03-24T21:20:14.114Z

Chesterton's Fence

cautions us against making changes rashly, before we understand the reason why something is the way it is.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

The

Onion In The Varnish

cautions us against accepting the status quo of how things are done. Ingredients we don’t understand should prompt us to ask what purpose they’re really serving.

In The Periodic Table, Primo Levi tells a story that happened when he was working in a varnish factory. He was a chemist, and he was fascinated by the fact that the varnish recipe included a raw onion. What could it be for? No one knew; it was just part of the recipe. So he investigated, and eventually discovered that they had started throwing the onion in years ago to test the temperature of the varnish: if it was hot enough, the onion would fry.

Chesterton’s Fence and The Onion in the Varnish seem obviously in conflict, right? Chesterton pushes us to conserve that which we don’t understand. Onion encourages questioning the need for that which we don’t understand. Chesterton in the varnish factory would keep throwing in the onion as long as he doesn’t understand its purpose. How to tell which is right and appropriate to apply in a given situation?

But really, both anecdotes teach us the same thing: it’s important to understand why things are the way they are. Both tearing down the fence and continuing to throw in the onion are bad, if you don’t understand why they’re being done.

This is similar to the lessons in

The Secret Of Our Success

and

Seeing Like A State

. Both encourage a healthy respect for culture. It’s easy to dismiss practices that seem silly, but the obvious / “correct” alternative may introduce unintended consequences. (

On Chesterton's Fence

exc...
Covid 3/24/22: Respite
by Zvi — 2022-03-24T15:00:00.934Z

All is quiet on the Covid front. Let us hope is stays that way.

Especially since we have no funding for anything.

Executive Summary

BA.2 on the rise, leading to some local rises in cases as in NY.
Federal government is out of funding for Covid.
China looking tenuous but has not lost yet.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 180k cases (-5%) and 6,300 deaths (-10%).

Results: 177k cases (-7%) and 7,045 deaths (-18%).

Prediction for next week: 177k cases (unchanged) and 6,200 deaths (-12%).

I am leaving the prediction as written but what happened was I accidentally multiplied from my prediction from the previous week rather than from the actual numbers. It is interesting that zero people pointed this out to me, but the intent of the prediction was a 10% decline, so either way I missed by something like 10%, except in opposite directions.

The important thing is that the actual result was a pleasant surprise this week rather than a disappointment. Deaths per cases-three-weeks-ago remain highly elevated, but I have settled into that being due to there being a second component of cases-within-last-60-days where such deaths are counted whether or not they have anything to do with having had Covid.

Conditions should remain similar, but BA.2’s share should rise again. Since there is now ~12% more BA.2, this should approximately stabilize the case numbers week over week.

Deaths

Notes on Deaths:

South Carolina reported negative 2,465 deaths, which I changed to +100 deaths.

Florida did not report at all, I approximated 700 deaths.

This thread attempts to explain the high death counts in the context of Denmark, claiming that many of the Covid deaths are ‘with-Covid’ and not causally linked to the disease. The impact is potentially on the order of 40% of deaths being misattributed, which would go a long way to explaining why death rates are not declining so quickly when cases are in rapid decline here in America.

Cases

As a share of cases, BA.2 rose from about 23% to 35%, as noted in the next section it should continue to increase for a bit but seems unlikely to cause a major wave or crisis. Perhaps modest prevention measures will have to be readopted, perhaps not, but private reaction should be sufficient there.

China

China ‘blames’ BA.2, continues to use half-measures.

Shenzhen is pr

...
The Ontics and The Decouplers
by hawkebia — 2022-03-24T14:04:26.213Z

I recently came across the posts which underpin the usage of "decoupling" within the rationalist community. While useful, I think they conflate a distinct approach to how people think and communicate, which I call Onticism, with Decoupling.

ontic /ˈɒntɪk/ adjective PHILOSOPHY

relating to entities and the facts about them;
relating to real as opposed to phenomenal existence.

The two posts are

Deep Dive into the Harris-Klein Controversy

by John Nert, and

Decoupling vs Contextualising Norms

by Chris Leong.

Here are the descriptions of two styles of conversation from Chris' piece:

Decoupling norms: It is considered eminently reasonable to require the truth of your claims to be considered in isolation - free of any potential implications. An insistence on raising these issues despite a decoupling request are often seen as sloppy thinking or attempts to deflect.
Contextualising norms: It is considered eminently reasonable to expect certain contextual factors or implications to be addressed. Not addressing these factors is often seen as sloppy or an intentional evasion.

Revisiting Bayes

The pithiest expression I've heard of what Bayes Theorem means is: Evidence should not determine beliefs, only update them. And the Bayes Theorem shows you how. When I first heard it

expressed this way

, I found it to be truly beautiful - it captured what I understand to be the core of rational and scientific thinking i.e. decoupling.

And so, three approaches emerge:

Contextualizers: Prior beliefs should determine how we interpret new evidence. If new evidence disagrees with our priors, we should inherently be skeptical of this evidence.
Ontics: Evidence tells us what is true. We can make factual statements based on evidence. Our prior beliefs should not be relevant when faced with new evidence.
Decouplers: New evidence should update our prior beliefs. Even when this evidence disagrees with our prior beliefs. We must temporarily and willfully suspend our prior beliefs when interpreting new evidence so that we can do this update accurately.

Contexualizers give primacy to Beliefs, Ontics to Evidence and Decouplers to P(Belief|Evidence) = [P(Belief)*P(Evidence|Belief)]/P(Evidence).

Or: Contexualizers are weak updaters, Ontics are strong updaters and Decouplers are ...? I'm not sure "accurate" is the appropriate word here, but maybe they're just more comfortable with maintaining uncertain beliefs....
What if fiat money was created at a fixed rate and given to government?
by MrThink — 2022-03-24T13:02:29.864Z

Currently, new fiat money is generally created by central banks that gives out that money as loans, or more recently, by central banks simply creating money to buy assets (called quantitative easing).

What would likely the effects be, if a new country decided that their central banks created a fixed amount of money per year, let's say 4% new money per year, and gave this money directly to the government?
Christopher Alexander's architecture for learning
by Henrik Karlsson — 2022-03-24T09:11:00.987Z
Link: https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/christopher-alexanders-architecture?s=w

On the 17th of March 2022, Christopher Alexander, the architect and mathematician, passed away. Alexander, whose intellectual influence extended far beyond architecture and urban planning, gave the impetus to several central ideas in modern software development, such as wikis, agile, and object-oriented programming. But his main contribution was in vernacular architecture – that is architecture without architects – where houses are built gradually by the people who live in them.

To honor his memory, I would like to take this moment to reflect on some of his ideas in the area where he has influenced me the most: on how architecture can unlock learning in society. How can we best make sure that the knowledge we need is sustained over generations?

For knowledge to pass from one generation to the next we fundamentally need three things. Firstly, we need ways for the young to access the environments they are to master so they can learn through imitation. Secondly: for skills that are hard to learn through imitation, we need deliberate instruction. And finally, for emotional support, we need houses where children can seek refuge from their families or get support when their parents are busy.

These points are not original on their own; schools try to do at least the last two. What is more interesting is how thoroughly Alexander went about solving it. He proposed not a new type of school but a series of architectural patterns that would weave the functions into the very fabric of society. Access to environments, deliberate instruction, and safe homes would be a seamless part of everything – an "educational system so radically decentralized” that it “becomes congruent with the urban structure itself."

At the heart of this was a pattern he called network of learning.

Network of learning

The book where Alexander most clearly lays out his ideas about learning is in his 1977 cult classic A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, which he co-wrote with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein.

It is a peculiar tome: a choose your own adventure for how to build a modern medieval city-state.

It is quite dizzying in scope and detail. Together with its companion pieces, The Timeless Way of Building and The Oregon Experiment, the book spans 1912 pages and contains 253 architectural ”patterns”. Each pattern describes “a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, ...
Experimental longtermism: theory needs data
by Jan_Kulveit — 2022-03-24T08:23:40.454Z
Link: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/dr4yccYeH6Zs7J82s/p/by8u954PjM2ctcve7

The series explains my part in the response to COVID, my reasons for switching from AI alignment work to the COVID response for a full year, and some new ideas the experience gave me. While it is written from my (Jan Kulveit's) personal perspective, I co-wrote the text with Gavin Leech, with input from many others.

The first post covers my main motivation: experimental longtermism.

Feedback loop

Possibly the main problem with longtermism and x-risk reduction is the weak and slow feedback loop.

(You work on AI safety; at some unknown time in the future, an existential catastrophe happens, or doesn’t happen, as a result of your work, or not as a result of your work.)
Most longtermists and existential risk people openly admit that the area doesn't have good feedback loops. Still, I think the community at large underappreciates how epistemically tricky our situation is. Disciplines that lack feedback from reality are exactly the ones that can easily go astray.

But most longtermist work is based on models of how the world works - or doesn’t work. These models try to explain why such large risks are neglected, the ways institutions like government or academia are inadequate, how various biases influence public perception and decision making, how governments work during crises, and so on. Based on these models, we take further steps (e.g. writing posts like this, uncovering true statements in decision theory, founding organisations, working at AI labs, going into policy, or organising conferences where we explain to others why we believe the long-term future is important and x-risk is real).

Covid as opportunity

Claim: COVID presented an unusually clear opportunity to put some of our models and theory in touch with reality, thus getting more "experimental" data than is usually possible, while at the same time helping to deal with pandemic. The impact of the actions I mentioned above is often unclear even after many years, whereas in the case of COVID impact of similar actions was observable within weeks and months.
For me personally, there was one more pull. My background is in physics, and in many ways, I still think like a physicist. Physics - in contrast to most of maths and philosophy - has the advantage of being able to put its models in touch with reality, and to use this signal as an important driver in finding out what's true. In modern maths, (basically...
On expected utility, part 4: Dutch books, Cox, and Complete Class
by Joe Carlsmith — 2022-03-24T07:51:18.221Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

Previously in sequence: Skyscrapers and madmen; Why it can be OK to predictably lose; VNM, separability, and more

This is the final essay in a four-part series on expected utility maximization (EUM). This part focus on theorems that aim to justify the subjective probability aspect of EUM, namely: Dutch Book theorems; Cox’s Theorem (this one is still a bit of a black box to me); and the Complete Class Theorem (this one also supports EUM more broadly). I also briefly discuss Savage, Jeffrey-Bolker, and a certain very general argument for making consistent trade-offs on the margin – both across goods, and across worlds.

I. Comparing with the urns

So we’ve seen three ways of arguing for EUM – an argument from the vNM axioms, an argument from the general connection between separability and additivity, and Peterson’s “direct argument.” In all of these cases, though, we had to assume some probability assignment. Let’s look at that assumption more directly.

The “hanging out with a coin-flipping, urn-pulling God” set-up made the assumption of a probability assignment relatively innocuous, in virtue of the fact that basically everyone wants to be a standard probabilist about things like coins, urns, and spinning wheels. For other types of propositions, though (e.g., “what’s the chance that some human walks on mars before 2100?”), some people, and some theories of probability (see here), start saying: “no, you can’t put probabilities on things like that.”

Still, fans of EUM often do. Indeed, they start putting probabilities on basically any kind of proposition you want -- probabilities often understood to express some subjective level of confidence, and hence called "subjective probabilities." This section briefly describe a more way of thinking about this practice I often use in my own life (I also gestured at this in part 2). Then I turn to some prominent theorems that fans of subjectivity probability often look to for support.

Suppose that God has already created a world. He’s told you some stuff about it, but you don’t know everything. Indeed, maybe God lets you descend into the world, live a particular life for a while, and then return to heaven, equipped with whatever knowledge of the world that life gave you.

And suppose that once you’re back in heaven, no matter what world God has created, you always love heavenly ice-cream wit...