trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Random facts can come back to bite you
by tailcalled — 2021-12-22T17:33:49.023Z

Consider the post Ads Don't Work That Way by Kevin Simler on Melting Asphalt. It contrasts a couple of different mechanisms by which advertising might work, including:

Emotional inception - manipulating your feelings towards a product via conditioning
Raising awareness - making you aware of a product or its features
Cultural imprinting - creating a societal association for a product, to allow people to use the product to associate themselves with this same association

The details are described in the post, and I'm sure that Kevin Simler describes the theory much better than I could. However, they are not very important, as I am not bringing up this post to make a point about advertising. Instead, I want to zoom in on an argument Kevin makes:

UNDERHANDED ADVERTISING

Consider this one for Corona:

Whatever's going on here, it's not about awareness, persuasion, promises, or honest signaling. In fact this image is almost completely devoid of information in the most literal sense. As Steven Pinker defines it, information is "a correlation between two things that is produced by a lawful process (as opposed to coming about by sheer chance)." In this case, the image is so arbitrary that it can't be conveying any information about Corona per se, as distinct from any other beer. Corona wasn't specifically designed for the beach, nor does 'beach-worthiness' emerge from any distinguishing features of Corona. You could swap in a Budweiser or Heineken and no "information" would be lost.

This seems obviously true. After all, what inherent connection could there possibly be between Corona and a sunny beach? In a footnote in the post, Kevin admits that there is a slight cultural/circumstantial/contextual factor, but that's not enough to change the core point of the post; the Corona/beach connection is obviously fairly arbitrary.

Except... now, years later, I've watched this YouTube video on the channel called "Food Theory":

In it, MatPat explains that beers can get "skunked" when hit by sunlight. However, it turns out that Corona beer is uniquely designed such that skunking improves its taste, unlike other beers which it worsens. Therefore, there actually is a genuine non-arbitrary connection between the Corona brand and drinking beer on the beach.

This was a completely random fact that I hadn't expected to jump out. I guess reality has a surprising amount of detail. But it makes the de...
What’s Up With the CDC Nowcast?
by Zvi — 2021-12-22T13:00:01.618Z

How’s it going?

The CDC nowcast last week was 2.7% Omicron. That seemed like a reasonable guess.

The CDC nowcast this week is 73% Omicron, and last week’s nowcast got revised from 2.7% to 12.6%.

That’s two retroactive extra doublings last week, and then four more in the following seven days relative to Delta, for a doubling time of less than two days.

That report came out right after I put out Omicron Post #8, and I quickly noticed I was confused.

One possibility is, hey, large error bars, so I guess there’s that?

This conversation provided potential factors, but did not clear up the confusion.

This provides a clear alternate hypothesis, and I trust the source quite a bit.

Censoring the past ten days is quite a high price to pay given how fast things are moving. That’s a lot of data to give up, and it’s worth noting that 10 days later the difference between 40% and 73% isn’t all that big in context. But if Trevor is right about the speed of submission, and the Nowcast isn’t adjusting, it’s going to give out a nonsense answer.

Which is exactly what it is giving. There are three huge problems with the nowcast’s answer, on top of the revision being rather large and not inspiring confidence.

Where are all the cases?
The regional numbers make even less sense.
Also, it’s averaging over a week so it’s implying even higher rates now.

The third problem I only noticed later, but if it’s 73% for the whole week, and 12% for last week, where did we enter the week, and therefore how high did we have to get to balance out the first few days? Not that this problem is necessary to notice the flaws.

The first issue jumped out at me right away. We know that there wasn’t a dramatic rise in the number of cases overall. We know there wasn’t a rise in the positive test percentage. Yet the claim is there was suddenly, over the whole week, three times as many Omicron cases as Delta. Does that mean that the number of Delta cases was down by more than half inside of a week? Does that seem remotely possible?

Testing capacity is a limiting factor, but if it was having a big effect, we’d presumably be seeing a much bigger jump in the positive test rate. I can imagine a world where that’s not true, but it doesn’t match the data from earlier in the pandemic.

This gets far more extreme if you go to the regional level, and the implications get ...
Morality and constrained maximization, part 1
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-12-22T08:47:19.228Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

Instrumental rationality is about achieving your goals. But morality, famously, sometimes demands that you don’t.

Suppose, for example, that you only want apples. Sometimes you might be in a position to steal apples, and get away with it, and know this. But morality still says: no.

So are morality and instrumental rationality in conflict? A classic answer is: yes, sometimes. But a classic hope is: maybe, on a sufficiently subtle picture of instrumental rationality, no?

This pair of posts examines such a hope. I focus on its expression in the work of the philosopher David Gauthier (and in particular, in his book Morals by Agreement). But I expect many of my comments to generalize.

Gauthier argues that rational agents should constrain their pursuit of their goals in order to avoid bad game-theoretic dynamics. Morality, he claims, is what falls out of such constraints. This post lays out the basics of Gauthier’s view. The next post evaluates it.

I. The problem

Gauthier begins where lots of people I know begin: with a picture of rational agency that takes an agent’s utility function as given and unquestionable, and directs that agent to maximize expected utility. That is, on Gauthier’s view, you aren’t allowed to tell an agent that their utility function isn’t nice and moral enough. You can’t say: “even if X in fact only cares about apples, she should care, intrinsically, about not stealing, about the well-being of the apple-owners, and so on — so stealing is irrational in this sense, even if it promotes her misguided goals.” Utility functions, for Gauthier, can be whatever. See my posts on “subjectivism”/”anti-realism” (1, 2, 3) for more on views in this vein.

In particular, utility functions can be totally indifferent to the utility functions (and general welfare) of others. Indeed, Gauthier proceeds with such asocial motivation as a backdrop assumption — not because he thinks humans are in fact this degree of asocial (though my sense is that he may be on the pessimistic end in this regard), but because he thinks morality should work even if they were.

In these respects, Gauthier’s view appeals to a certain kind of hard-nosed, pessimistic aesthetic. He begins in a universe free of “objective values,” populated, for all we know, by egoists, paperclip maximizers, dogs already eyeing the flesh of other dogs. Whatever the conventional...
Six Specializations Makes You World-Class
by lsusr — 2021-12-22T08:03:56.325Z

If you want an average, successful life, it doesn't take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two rather: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

―Scott Adams

You can make a lot of money by being the best at a scalable domain because leverage feeds winner-take-all dynamics.

The problem is there are P=8×109 people on Earth. To be the best, you have to be better than every single one of them. It's not hard to get into the top 0.1 or even 0.01 of people at many skills but it is hard to get into the top 1P=.0000000001.

There are many different skills you can learn e.g. mathematics, sales, drawing, management. Suppose there are S=100 basic skills. You can become the best in the world by being the best at any one of them. But to be the best at one of S=100 different skills you must compete against PS=80,000,000 people. Competing against eighty million people is easier than competing against eight billion but it is still hard.

Many real-world competitions require more than one skill. Suppose you want to be the best author of physics books. You must combine two skills: writing and physics. There are S(S−1)2=100(100−1)2≈5,000 different pairs of skills. Instead of competing against the rest of mankind in 100 domains you are competing in 5,000 different domains. On average, you will compete against 2PS(S−1)≈2PS2=1,600,000 people.

For n randomly-selected skills there will, on average, be only Pn!Sn people competing at the intersection. You are one of those people. At what n is there zero competition (besides yourself)?

Pn!Sn=1P=Snn!lnP=nlnS−ln(n!)≈nlnS−(nlnn−n)≈n(1+lnS−lnn)

lnn≈2 when 5≤n≤10.

lnP≈n(1+lnS−2)≈n(lnS−1)n≈lnPlnS−1≈ln(8×109)ln100−1≈6

Six. If S=100 then combining six skills at random makes you so specialized that literally nobody in the world is competing with you. The equation is weakly dependent on our choice of S. If S=50 then you need seven skills instead.

Six arbitrary skills may not be, in general, synergistic. But if your work combines six or more skills then you should not be surprised if you are the best in the world.

I am not a great artist, and I have never taken a traditional class in writing. I’m not the funniest person in my social circle, and I’m not a great business mind either. But few people in

...
Worldbuilding exercise: The Highwayverse.
by Yair Halberstadt — 2021-12-22T06:47:53.054Z

This is an exercise where I take a world which is otherwise the same as ours except for one physical law being changed, and try to work out what that world would look like.

This is meant to exercise my ability to work out how things are connected to other things - how does the impact of changing one physical law ripple across everything in the universe? It's also a good test of creative thinking - what technologies would people come up with in this world to exploit the new physical laws?

It was also great fun thinking about!

Premise

There are two universes, both otherwise absolutely identical to ours (and each other), except that:

The sentient creatures that inhabit these universes somehow have the ability to instantaneously switch from one universe to the other, as well as to instantaneously switch anything reasonably small they're relatively close to from one universe to the other.
If each universe exists for T time, and they switch from U1 at time t, they will appear in U2 at time T - t. In practice that means that time runs backwards when you switch universes. If you were to switch from U1 to U2, live in U2 for a year, and then switch back to U1, you would arrive a year earlier than you left.

The universes both end in a big crunch after about 30 billion years.

At the very midpoint of the universe, the earths in each one look absolutely identical, and are in exactly the same location. You can safely switch from one to the other without worrying about finding yourself in outer space or buried in the earths crust.

For complicated physics reasons this binds the two earths together, such that your position relative to the center of mass of the earth stays the same when you switch even if you switch at some time other than the exact midpoint of the universe. In practice this means that switching is safe so long as the continents haven't changed to much, and gets safer the closer you are to the midpoint.

Because the effect of this is that you can drive both ways through time, but on separate lanes (universes), I'm going to call this universe pair the Highwayverse.

I'm going to list my predictions about what the Highwayverse would look like, but feel free to play the game yourself, and come up with your own predictions!

Equilibrium

The most important fundamental law that governs the lives of the people who live in the Highwayverse is the idea of the equilibrium.

I...
Two (very different) kinds of donors
by Duncan Sabien (Inactive) — 2021-12-22T01:43:52.498Z

This post describes a very simple and very important distinction between two kinds of donors/two kinds of donations.

I apologize if the content of this (short) post is obvious to you. Repeated experience has led me to believe that it is not obvious to many people, and can sometimes be something of an epiphany for them, so it seems worth sharing in linkable form. A disagreement that is tightly analogous to this one is currently wrecking my parents' marriage, for instance, and they each independently found this to be a concretely useful metaphor.

There are (at least) two very different kinds of donors, and they give very different kinds of donations, and they do not always tag themselves or their donations as such. In part, this is because many people are unaware that [the other kind of donor] exists at all, and so they don't know that they need to identify themselves as being of a particular type. Both types, in my experience, assume themselves to be the default.

The first kind of donor is donating to the mission. They attend a CFAR workshop, for instance, and enjoy themselves immensely, and believe that the experience will be valuable for others. They want [more of that], so they donate to CFAR.

Whether they say so explicitly or not, they are donating to cause [more of that]. They believe and expect that their money will be used in ways which are legibly about causing [more of that]. Thus, while they may not actually earmark their donation in any particular way, if CFAR's books were to become public, they would expect to see expenditures like:

Venue costs
Food and catering costs
Subsidies for promising workshop attendees
Salaries for instructors and other staff
Continuing education for instructors and researchers (e.g. conference fees, program tuition, travel expenses directly related to such)
Staff retreats (for curriculum development)

I call these donors "legibles."

The second kind of donor is donating to an agent. They attend a CFAR workshop, for instance, and enjoy themselves immensely, and believe that the experience will be valuable for others. They think to themselves "the people who caused this to happen are doing something good in the world. I want to see more stuff like this. I want to unlock these people, so that they are free to pursue their ambitions."

Whether they say so explicitly or not, th...
Confusion about Sequences and Review Sequences
by Alex_Altair — 2021-12-21T18:13:13.394Z

I just made a series of attempted actions on the site that ended up with me being confused. Am I missing ways to use the site, or are these ways missing?

I was reading the page for the 2019 review book launch, and someone commented that the table of contents has no links. I thought to myself, I'll be helpful and post a comment that is a link to the 2019 review sequence! That is, the sequence page that is a list of all the posts that ended up in the 2019 review books. (The reason I thought this page existed is because I had recently found the sequence page for the 2018 review books.) I then searched around for this page by googling, and failed to find it. I then tried to go on the LW home page to see if there was a list of sequences. I saw "Library", which lists "Core Reading", "Curated Sequences" and "Community Sequences", but even after clicking "Load more" on Community Sequences until there were no more, I didn't see the Review sequences I was looking for. I thought for sure I had seen one, though, so then I went to a specific post that I thought I saw it on (Arguments about fast takeoff) and sure enough there was a link for the Alignment sequence at the top. This is one of the five books in the 2018 review. But it didn't itself contain a link to a higher-order sequence of all five books, or anything. And it isn't listed on the "Library" page.

So, it looks like the "Library" page doesn't list all sequences? Is there a place that does? And is there a sequence for the 2019 review? (If not, I'm happy to make one.)
Demanding and Designing Aligned Cognitive Architectures
by Koen.Holtman — 2021-12-21T17:32:57.482Z

This post is to announce my new paper Demanding and Designing Aligned
Cognitive Architectures, which I
recently presented in the PERLS
workshop (Political Economy of Reinforcement Learning)] at NeurIPS
2021.

In this post, I will give a brief overview of the paper, specifically
written for this forum and the LW/EA communities. I will highlight some
of the main differences with the AI alignment approaches and outlooks
more often discussed here.

The comment section below can be used for general comments and Q&A
about the entire paper.

Scope of the paper

The main focus of this paper is to improve the global debate about the
medium-term alignment problems in purple below.

In the last few years, these two problems have moved inside society's
Overton window, not
only in the West but also in China. So it is topical to write papers
which focus specifically on improving the debate about these two
problems.

But I also have more long-term, x-risk related motivation for
discussing these two problems. If society develops better tools and
mechanisms for managing them, I expect that it will also become better
at managing the long-term x-risk problems on the right.

Alignment as a policy problem

The word demanding describes a political act, whereas designing is
a technical act. The phrase 'Demanding and Designing' in the paper
title gives a hint that there will be a cross-disciplinary
discussion inside. This discussion fuses insights about running
political processes with insights about AI technology.

On this forum and in the broader Rationalist/EA web sphere, it is
common to see posts which treat all political activity as a source of
irrationality and despair only. In the paper, I develop a very
different viewpoint.

I treat politics as the sum total of activities in society that
contribute to creating, updating, and legitimizing social
contracts. Social
contracts can be encoded in law, customs, institutions, code, or all
of the above. They aim to produce mutual benefit by binding the
actions of society's stakeholders.

In this framing, AI alignment policy making is the activity of having
a broad debate that will update our existing social contracts.
Updates of social contracts are preferably decided on in a debate that
will involve all affected stakeholders at some stage, or at least
involve their representatives.

These are all pretty standard Enlightenment ideas. Crucial...
Experiences raising children in shared housing
by juliawise — 2021-12-21T17:09:05.008Z

Crosspost from The Whole Sky.
Sometimes I see posts about people’s hope to raise children in a group housing situation, and it often seems overly optimistic to me. In particular they seem to expect that there will be more shared childcare than I think should be expected.
Today I talked to another parent who lived in a co-op when her child was a newborn. She didn’t get into specifics, but her summary was “We didn’t even make it a year.”

Jeff and I have lived in several group situations with kids. I’ll describe each of them at the end, but first some takeaways:

The main benefits of parenting in shared housing have been:

Adult company. Compared to most nuclear families where you have maybe one other adult to talk with at the end of the day, we like having several of us at dinner and some hanging out at other times.
Less housework in general. We’ve always had a dinner rotation with each adult cooking roughly once a week. Shared grocery shopping, taking out the trash, and cleaning get some economies of scale. Our kids produce a lot of the mess, so we try to account for that in doing housework.
More intergenerational contact. I think it’s good for the kids to know more adults than their parents and teacher, and I hope the housemates enjoy having some kid time in their life.

The main downsides:

In addition to whatever other housing preferences people have, it’s harder to find a space that works in terms of lead safety, layout with children’s spaces not too noisy for other housemates, and access to outdoor play space.
Kid noise bothering other housemates. To some extent this is just an inevitable reality of apartment living, but it’s more intense when you see each other all the time. We’ve had a couple of housemates who are particularly sensitive to kid yelling / foot noise. In one case we tried to mitigate it by padding the floor and eventually Jeff heavily soundproofing their ceiling, but it wasn’t enough and they eventually moved out. I’m sure this is unpleasant for the housemates, and it’s unpleasant for me to feel like I need to police kids doing normal kid things (not just yelling and running, but also things like tapping feet on the floor while doing homework, or in one case, stirring a bowl of cookie dough too loudly for the person downstairs). Jeff finds this kind of thing less anxiety-producing than I do.
Mess. This hasn’t actually been much of a problem in our house

...
What questions do you have about doing work on AI safety?
by peterbarnett — 2021-12-21T16:36:09.246Z

As part of the work

Nonlinear

is doing to try and improve the state of AI safety research, we’re going to be talking with a range of researchers. One of our aims is to help people who are unsure about doing AI safety research figure out if this is a good fit for them. We’re planning on talking about things like:

What skills are actually useful?
What the day-to-day work is like?
Misconceptions about the job
And any other advice they have

We’d love to hear questions about doing AI safety research from people who are considering moving into the field but are still currently on the fence.
Perpetual Dickensian Poverty?
by jefftk — 2021-12-21T13:30:03.543Z

Several of my friends have been sharing screenshots of this Twitter post:

Time for your annual reminder that, according to A Christmas Carol,
Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that's
$530.27/wk, $27,574/yr, or $13.50/hr.

Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory
for destitution.

—Chris Thompson

It's wrong, but it's wrong in an interesting way!

A Christmas
Carol came out in 1843. The Bank
of England Inflation Calculator, which incredibly goes back to
1209, estimates £1 in 1843 is equivalent to £130 in 2020.
Since there were 20 shillings to the pound, 15s/wk in 1843 makes
£98/wk in 2020. Cratchit would have been working six days a week
at perhaps ten hours a day, so we get £1.63/hr or $2.15/hr. The
post gave $13.50/hr; where's the factor of six coming from?

There are multiple ways to figure inflation. The most common one, and
the one I use above, is purchasing power: what can you buy with your
£? While I can't replicate Thompson's number exactly, I think
he's instead using using labor value: how many hours of someone's time
can you buy? 15s/wk in 1843 is, deflated by the cost of labor, £611/wk
in 2020, or $807/wk. For a 60hr week that's $13.45/hr.

The problem is, no matter how much richer we get, using the cost of
labor to adjust worker pay for inflation will always show that workers
are paid the same amount. It's saying "Cratchit was paid X% of a
typical wage for 1843, which you can think of as if he were
paid X% of a typical 2020 wage, which is $13.45/hr." This sort of
adjustment makes sense if you're trying to understand the
social position of the Cratchit family, but since what we care about
here is their absolute level of poverty, purchasing power is the right
measure.

(Thanks to Marcus
for pointing this out.)

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