trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How much can surgical masks help with wildfire smoke?
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2020-08-21T15:46:12.914Z

If you look online, you'll see lots of serious people saying that paper surgical masks will not help protect you from wildfire smoke. However, I'm suspicious that this largely reflects a kind of signaling perspective and doesn't consider how effective they might be or under what circumstances and in what ways they might help.

That is, let's say surgical masks are 20% as good as N95 respirators which are 50% as good as P100 respirators at filtering out wildfire smoke (these numbers are 100% fabricated, although I think the ordering is right), then very responsible people will tell you don't wear a surgical mask because it won't help much, and if someone who didn't understand the details just heard "oh, surgical mask is good enough" they might wear one in a situation that lead to them being injured. Compare the lack of nuance in masking guidelines for COVID-19 purposes, and I think you get why I think something like this is going on.

But if a surgical mask was all you had, how much would it help? Enough to be worth, say, wearing one when you otherwise wouldn't wear one in order to help reduce smoke inhalation? Enough to be worth wearing indoors as part of a defense-in-depth strategy combined with HEPA air filtration?
What am I missing? (quantum physics)
by kithpendragon — 2020-08-21T12:39:12.418Z

I've read many times about an experiment: take a 2-particle system and measure that it has a spin of 0. This tells us that the particles have opposite spin. Now, take the particles far away from each other and measure one. If you measure spin up, for example, you now know the other particle has spin down.

Why would anybody be surprised by this?

Let's imagine a similar classical experiment that uses literal spin. Take a system of two gyroscopes, each spinning at the same fixed speed, each in it's own sealed box. They can be powered or whatever so they stay spinning for the duration. Stack the two boxes ("entangling" their spin), and measure 0 spin to confirm that the gyroscopes are in fact spinning in opposite directions (some helicopters use this principle for stabilization on the y-axis instead of a tail propeller). Now, send the boxes far apart and measure one of them using the right hand rule. If it turns out to have spin up, the other will intuitively turn out to have spin down. But nobody will be surprised by this because we knew from the beginning that the pair was spinning in opposite directions; we just didn't know which was which before measuring one of them.

------------------------

Update: 2020Apr24
Thanks for all the comments, explanations, and links! I'm not ignoring them, just trying to find time between work and family responsibilities to digest and understand them before I ask my follow-up questions. I appreciate your patience!
Coronavirus and Rents II
by jefftk — 2020-08-21T02:30:08.289Z

When I looked into how Boston apartment listings have changed
year-over-year

in June I saw
that rents had been falling, and wrote:

I think we're probably not done, though. Many landlords are small, and
slow to react to changing market conditions. We're playing reverse
musical chairs, where many landlords are going to be stuck without a
tenant come September first. The ones who have realized this are
offering lower rents, trying to keep their tenants, and as we get
closer to September I expect more will catch on.

This does seem to be happening, though perhaps less dramatically than I
had predicted:

While in June most of the decrease had been in high-end apartments and
the median 2br had dropped only slightly, at this point, in August,
there are decreases across the board and the median 2br listing is
down ~8%.

While 2br apartments are the most common size in the Boston area,
different unit sizes have been affected differently:

Smaller apartments, studios through 2br, have gotten cheaper, but 3br
and 4br units are roughly unchanged, and 5br units have gotten
noticeably more expensive.

I don't know what's driving this. You could tell a story where covid
and remote work/school means people are willing to pay more for more
space, but if the data were the other way around you could tell a
story where the people who needed more space were moving out of the city.

Another thing to keep in mind is that these are listings, which means
they're what landlords are asking and not necessarily what they're
getting. And it looks like landlords are still adjusting to the
musical chairs nature of the current situation:

This is the number of units listed each month relative to the same
time last year. You can see that the market is tighter than last year
for larger units. For 2br and smaller units, however, there are many
more still on the market than last year and there the delta is
growing. This matches what we saw above with prices.

I'm happy to see the area become more affordable, but I wish this
weren't the reason why.

Comment via: facebook
Analyzing Blackmail Being Illegal (Hanson and Mowshowitz related)
by curi — 2020-08-20T18:56:19.087Z

Highlights from the Blackmail Debate (Robin Hanson vs Zvi Mowshowitz) by Ben Pace:

Here's my overview of their positions.

Zvi thinks that blackmail would incentivize a whole host of terrible actions, such as trying to trick people into norm violation, and people becoming intensely secretive even around their closest friends and family.

Robin thinks that blackmail is a weird rule, where you cannot ask for money to keep a secret, but the other person is allowed to offer it (e.g. people can offer you money if you sign an NDAs). This makes no sense and Robin is looking for any clear reason why making one side of this deal should be illegal.

Thoughts Before Reading More of the Post

there are practical problems. e.g. blackmailers may make additional demands later, and it’s hard to hold them to the original deal b/c if you bring up the deal for enforcement then your secret comes out

and ppl actively trying to get blackmail material is a problem, as Zvi says

NDAs are done preemptively which is different. you ask someone to agree to keep X secret as a condition of sharing X with him.

blackmail is someone who already knows X in advance and is now negotiating for potential secrecy.

NDAs are commonly signed with no payment, or at least no direct payment for them (required with employment)

ppl sign NDAs b/c they want access to the info b/c they have an actual productive purpose for using that info themselves – often a business purpose like providing consulting advice about it or developing software related to it.

blackmailers commonly have no productive uses of the info.
their choices are roughly do nothing or hurt someone.

in cases where the blackmailer got the info legally and it isn’t e.g. copyrighted, and he isn’t lying (no fraud), it’s unclear where the initiation of force is if he shares it with the world. and if that’s not force, it’s hard to see how offering not to do it for money would be force.

it’s easy to see why this sort of thing is bad for society, at least in the sorts of scenarios typically associated with blackmail.

let’s consider an example. i see you in public with a woman. you kiss. i know you’re married. i don’t take any photos. i just witness it and then tell you that i’m going to (accurately and honestly) tell your wife unless you pay me $1000. if you pay once, i contractually agree to never use this again, even if I see you with that woman again. (i c...
How More Knowledge is Making Us Dumber
by jdcampolargo — 2020-08-20T15:08:50.344Z

This essay was originally published on my website.

The 21st century da Vinci will be a billionaire who combines science and business seamlessly. He is also a master of the latest technology, creating the most surprising companies that look like masterpieces. The 21st century Mona Lisa will not be a portrait, but a groundbreaking company.

He/She will be one of many new renaissance polymaths—amid a simultaneous rise of uneducated people.

Welcome to the coming intellectual inequality.

And it all goes back to how access to knowledge has evolved.

Since the beginning of time, there were people more knowledgeable than others because knowledge was not as widespread. This was often the difference between the haves and have nots, creating inequality among people.

Knowledge was stored in our memory and was handed down to generation after generation. This method was ineffective because we had to rely on our memories, and we don’t always remember the little details.

Knowledge went from being in our brains to a form of visual description. What we call writing. This form was more effective as you could include as detail and information as you’d like. Yet, we had an issue sharing these writings to our fellow humans. Ancient Egyptians were the first to use a paper-like material and glued them together to share knowledge.

In the 1550s, Johannes Gutenberg created the first mechanical printing press, enabling mass production of books. From the 15th century until the 21st century, knowledge was shared and stored using books. Then in the 2000s, we no longer needed physical knowledge as it could be stored digitally more efficiently.

The change from physical to digital allows anyone in the world with an internet connection to access all the world’s information, mostly for free.

From now on, you just need the intention and desire to learn to get knowledge. It’s that simple. As knowledge became more widespread, all types of knowledge including entertainment are available.

The easy access to knowledge will make the extremes more notable. Just as the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, similarly the smart get smarter, and the dumb get dumber. As a result, there will be a rise of new renaissance people and polymaths as well as a rise of uneducated and only-entertainment people.

This isn’t new. As e...
"Technology and the Future of Persons", by Lynne Rudder Baker (2013)
by Callmesalticidae — 2020-08-20T14:31:29.934Z

Salticidae Philosophiae is a series of abstracts, commentaries, and reviews on philosophical articles and books.

Lynne Rudder Baker asks under what circumstances (if any) external objects can be considered part of us in the same manner as an arm or brain.

You can find the paper here, on JSTOR.

Highlights

The line between us and our technology is beginning to blur.
The fact that we feel as though we are persons is sufficient evidence that persons exist.
Any explanation of personhood in the context of merging technology must therefore take this into account.
Technology can be considered part of us when it is integrated into our bodies in a functional and permanent fashion.

New or uncommon terminology

Person is used in this paper to refer to a "self-understanding moral and rational agent."
The extended-mind thesis is the idea that thoughts and minds can be differentiated from each other as content and content containers, respectively, and that (1) brains are not the only possible content containers and (2) content containers can have multiple physical components. In other words, it is possible to meaningfully speak of a mind that exists not just in a person's brain but extends into e.g. that person's notebook. Baker uses the terms "system," "shifting array," and "coalition" to refer to this mind.
The intentional stance is a position in which we are explaining and predicting behavior in terms of mental properties like beliefs and desires. If the behavior of a thing can be explained from the intentional stance then it is an intentional system. Technically, one does not have to actually have mental properties in order to be an intentional system, but merely behave as though one has mental properties, because this position is considered with interpretations rather than reality.

Overview

Baker starts by pointing out that we are beginning to merge with technology (e.g. cochlear implants) and technology is being developed that will further blur this line, such as computers that are commanded by the firing of neurons.

Following this is an overview of the "extended-mind thesis" (hereafter EMT). Baker describes a being in this paradigm as a system, reaching out and discarding various components and generating an ongoing, retroactive narrative that gives the system a (false) sense of self. She r...
Covid 8/20: A Little Progress
by Zvi — 2020-08-20T14:30:00.920Z

(Writer’s note: Due to the utter trainwreck that is WordPress’ new editor, this week’s post was written in Google Docs and then cut and pasted into WordPress. This is an excellent example of the principle that any given thing is likely getting worse even as things in general improve. As an experiment, I’m opening the draft document to public comments – I think commenting on the side as the post goes is actually a better method, and I encourage you to read it and comment on it there.)

The Covid news is not as excellent as it looks at first, but it is still good.

The positive test percentages, and the number of people testing positive, are dropping fast. The number of people hospitalized is dropping as well. The number of reported deaths mostly continues on its plateau, but that almost certainly reflects a dropping number of actual deaths by this point.

Those positive test percentages look less impressive when broken out by region, which we do this week for the first time, but improvement is still improvement.

There’s even a rapid test freshly approved by the FDA, thanks to the NBA. More on that in its section, but don’t say sports never did anything for you.

There’s also a lot of noise out there. There’s some new official lying for our own good I need to complain about.

It’s still important to celebrate the good times, when the times are good. Even if those times aren’t as good as we would like or hope.

Thanks to some C# code, I am now downloading and parsing the .csv files from CovidTrackingProject, which makes the data far easier to analyze.

Let’s run the newly expanded numbers.

Positive Test Counts

Date
WEST
MIDWEST
SOUTH
NORTHEAST

June 4-June 10
35487
24674
55731
22693

June 11-June 17
41976
22510
75787
17891

June 18-June 24
66292
26792
107221
15446

June 25-July 1
85761
34974
163472
16303

July 2-July 8
103879
40139
202863
18226

July 9-July 15
108395
53229
250072
20276

July 16-July 22
117506
57797
265221
20917

July 23-July 29
110219
67903
240667
26008

July 30-Aug 5
91002
64462
212945
23784

Aug 6-Aug 12
93042
61931
188486
21569

Aug 13-Aug 19
80887
63384
156998
20857

Here we see a hopeful continuation of previous trends. The South and Northeast continue to rapidly improve. The West has resumed improvement after last week’s setback. The Midwest continues to be stuck in place.

Death Counts

Date
WEST
MIDWEST
SOUTH
NORTHEAST

June 4-Ju

...
Market Misconceptions
by gilch — 2020-08-20T04:46:21.991Z

Part 5 of the Inefficient Markets sequence.

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

You, dear reader, are probably not average.
I expect a certain selection bias for readers of this blog.
You know how to use a spreadsheet.
You can probably write code.
You can apply mathematics to real life.
You're aware of your own cognitive biases, to some degree.
You understand why that's important.

Making good decisions under uncertainty is the very essence of trading.
As I said in part 1, rationalists are already halfway to quant.
Do you have any idea how much money is moving through those markets?
There's gold in those hills.

So why aintcha rich?

Different readers may answer this differently,
but it may go something like this.

Because you haven't been trading. Why?
Because you don't know how. Why?
Because you never studied how. Why?
Maybe you thought you had better things to do.
Maybe you didn't think it was worth the effort.
Maybe you didn't realize how much we all need more money.

Maybe because you don't believe you can succeed.

Why?

Trading Is Dangerous

Most retail traders fail to beat the index.
Monkeys throwing darts at newspapers do a better job of picking stocks than the pundits.
When you trade with borrowed money,
you can lose more than you invested.
For some people, trading is a ruinous gambling addiction.

Successful Trading Is Impossible

The Efficient Market Hypothesis means you can't exploit the markets
They're random.
There's no such thing as alpha--reward for skill instead of risk.
Successful alpha traders are an illusion.
They're just lucky.
People also win the lottery, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a bad investment.

There's still beta--reward for taking risk.
But the only way to get a higher return is to take on more risk.

Not That Strong

The strong form of the EMH,
the idea that markets are perfect,
that even private information is reflected in the stock price,
is too strong.
The strong form is simply implausible given insider trading laws.
That these laws are a good idea is a matter of some debate among economists.
Nevertheless, the laws are there.

But you don't have insider information,
and probably couldn't trade it if you did.

The semi-strong form,
that allows for the possibility of private information not reflected in the price,
might as well be strong for you.

Weak Is Strong Enough?

The Weak EMH m...
Highlights from the Blackmail Debate (Robin Hanson vs Zvi Mowshowitz)
by Ben Pace — 2020-08-20T00:49:49.639Z

At one of our weekly LessWrong events, we had a lively debate on legalizing blackmail (video, transcript). Robin Hanson took the pro side, Zvi Mowshowitz took the con, and I moderated. 70 people showed up to watch for ~2 hours.

Here's my overview of their positions.

Zvi thinks that blackmail would incentivize a whole host of terrible actions, such as trying to trick people into norm violation, and people becoming intensely secretive even around their closest friends and family.
Robin thinks that blackmail is a weird rule, where you cannot ask for money to keep a secret, but the other person is allowed to offer it (e.g. people can offer you money if you sign an NDAs). This makes no sense and Robin is looking for any clear reason why making one side of this deal should be illegal.

Below are some quotes from their conversation. And of course, there's the full edited transcript and video for those who want all the details.

Highlights

What's good about blackmail

Robin Hanson: I think in the case of say David Letterman, who famously was blackmailed for having affairs, if he could have actually been successfully blackmailed, then people like Letterman would be doing much less of what he was doing. And these weren't just affairs with random people who liked him, these were employees of him and so they are much more morally questionable. And so I think there would just be a lot less sexual harassment if blackmail was legal.

Robin Hanson: There are a lot of powerful people who break a lot of rules, actually legal rules in many ways. And then the people around them shut up about it, let them get away with it because they don't feel they actually have a credible threat to report it. And so they don't. And so blackmail would mean a lot more actual reporting or a discouragement of the things powerful people do, that break rules and norms.

Spreading dirt is often prosocial

Zvi Mowshowitz: Essentially your argument is that in today's world, if people online were to find out something about you and decide to cause a lot of trouble in your life based on this thing, that it must've been a bad thing that the public absolutely needed to know.

Robin Hanson: On average, letting people know about other people's dirt is a good thing. The incentives to not have dirt, the incentive to expose dirt, are on average a good thing. Yes, they go wrong in many particular ways. But on average, they're go

...
The Bayesian Tyrant
by abramdemski — 2020-08-20T00:08:55.738Z

Long ago and far away, there was a kingdom called Estimor in a broad green valley surrounded by tall grey mountains. It was an average kingdom in most respects, until the King read the works of Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsy, and decided to institute a Royalist Futarchy.

(This is a parable about the differences between Bayesian updates and logical induction. See also: Radical Probabilism.)

The setup was very simple. It followed the futarchic motto, "Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs" -- the only special consideration being that there was just one voting constituent (that being the King). A betting market would inform the King of everything He needed to know in order to best serve His interests and the interests of Estimor (which were, of course, one and the same).

The Seer's Hall -- a building previously devoted to religious prophecy -- was repurposed to serve the needs of the new betting market. (The old prophets were, of course, welcome to participate -- so long as they were willing to put money on the line.)

All went well at first. The new betting market allowed the King to set the revenue-maximizing tax rate, via the Laffer curve. An early success of the market was the forecasting of a grain shortage based on crop growth early in the season, which allowed ample time for grain to be purchased from neighboring lands.

Being an expert Bayesian Himself, the King would often wander the Seer's Hall, questioning and discussing with the traders at the market. Sometimes the King would be shocked by what he learned there. For example, many of the traders were calculating the Kelly betting criterion to determine how much to invest in a single bet. However, they then proceeded to invest only a set fraction of the Kelly amount (such as 80%). When questioned, traders replied that they were hedging against mistakes in their own calculations, or reducing volatility, or the like.

One day, the King noticed a man who would always run in and out of the Hall, making bets hastily. This man did particularly well at the betting tables -- he ended the day with a visibly heavy purse. However, when questioned by The King as to the source of his good luck, the man had no answers. This man will subsequently be referred to as the Fool.

The King ordered spies to follow the Fool on his daily business. That evening, spies returned to report that The Fool was running back and forth between t...
Should we write more about social life?
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-08-19T20:07:17.055Z

Social life is a thorny subject. Writings on that topic can be noxious, for a variety of reasons. Yet we live in a social world, and instrumental rationality ought to make us better at navigating it. Furthermore, if status competition is a war of all against all, and "all warfare is based on deception," as Sun Tzu says, then we should expect that this is one of the areas where rationality might be especially helpful. On this website, people post self-help advice through a rationalist lens all the time. Yet I rarely see rationalist self-help advice on topics such as how to have a thriving social life, get along with your parents, strike up a conversation with a stranger, build a blog audience, or field a disagreement without lying, submitting, or looking like a jerk.

I'd consider the following to be virtues of posts about social life:

Striving for generality as much as (but no more than) is possible.
Avoiding moral judgments and political resentments.
Balancing a basically positive and constructive attitude with a healthy skepticism towards platitudes.

Do you agree that this forum might benefit from more posts on social life? What would you be most interested in writing or reading about? What do you tend to find most frustrating when reading people's takes on social life, here or elsewhere?