trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
How About a Remote Variolation Study?
by Liron — 2020-04-03T12:04:04.439Z

Robin in Variolation May Cut Covid19 Deaths 3-30x:

Just as replacing accidental smallpox infections with deliberate low dose infections cut smallpox deaths by a factor of 10 to 30, a factor of 3-30 is plausible for Covid19 death rate cuts due to replacing accidental Covid19 infections with deliberate small dose infections.

[...] Systematic variolation experiments involving at most a few thousand volunteers seem sufficient to get evidence not only on death rates, but also on ideal infection doses and methods, and on the value of complementary drugs that slow viral replication (e.g., remdesivir). [...] A small early trial could generate much useful attention and discussion regarding this strategy

Zvi in Taking Initial Viral Load Seriously:

My prior at this point is that the difference between a low and high initial viral load of Covid-19 is large. [...] That difference is a really, really big deal. It’s a much bigger deal than getting enough ventilators. It’s potentially a bigger deal than having a medical system at all.

[...] The more I think about the Covid-19 situation, the more I think the highest leverage thing most people reading this can do is to find ways to get our hands on better data.

Right now we are all very keen to know the values of X and P in this statement:

"If you have an X% risk of infection with a large inoculum in the next month, you should deliberately infect yourself now with a small inoculum via protocol P"

The following are sufficient for many people to undertake variolation for themselves and their loved ones:

A. An easy variolation protocol

B. Proof that variolation works to reduce COVID hospitalization rate 3x+

What we're missing right now:

1. A few plausible ideas for variolation protocols

2. A study where 10k volunteers try the various protocols, then get tested for how large of an inoculum they got (data on the variolation protocols), then report their outcomes (data on variolation itself)

Does anyone have any ideas for #1?

For #2, a remote study on thousands of volunteer heroes self-variolating from within their current self-quarantines (isolated from all non-volunteers) seems like the fastest and cheapest way to get initial data.

This doesn't necessarily have to be a "Scientific" study. It can be a crowdsourced, crowdfunded movement. The data will be lower quality than scientific-study data, but hig...
Has LessWrong been a good early alarm bell for the pandemic?
by DirectedEvolution — 2020-04-03T09:44:39.205Z

The S&P 500 began to crash on Feb. 20th.

On or prior to that date, there were 6 posts on LessWrong related to COVID-19 (thanks to habryka, who found 3 that I'd missed).

Jan 20 - Rationalist prepper thread

Jan 26 - Concerning the Recent 2019-Novel Coronavirus Outbreak

Feb 5 - Some quick notes on hand hygiene

Feb 11 - Will nCoV survivors suffer lasting disability at a high rate?

Feb 14 - Please Help Metaculus Forecast COVID-19

Feb 20 - Making sense of coronavirus stats

As a bonus, Scott Alexander dropped a link in his Links 2/20 post saying "As of earlier this month, China’s coronavirus case numbers followed such a neat quadratic curve that they seem kind of like low-effort fakes. Not sure if this also applies to the current numbers."

Near-daily COVID posting began on Feb. 20th. After Feb. 27th, the number of LW COVID-19 posts has increased by about 4 posts per day to a total of nearly 200:

The New York Times has compiled a recent history of the pandemic.

Before Feb 20, what had happened?

The WHO had declared a global health emergency
The Trump administration had restricted travel from China
There had been hundreds of deaths, including some outside China
Almost 50,000 cases were reported in Hubei Province
Hundreds of people aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship were infected, the ship had been quarantined, and the passengers had finally been able to disembark

By Feb. 23, the S&P 500 had started to descend, and Italy was beginning to lock its cities down. It wasn't until around Feb. 27th, after Trump requested a big bailout from Congress, Iran reported over 60 deaths, and cases had spread to Latin America, that LessWrong began to see accelerated COVID posting. The number spiked from around 1 post per day to the average of 4-5 posts per day we've seen since then.

If the sheer volume of conversation is our alarm bell, this site seems to have lagged behind the stock market by about a week.
How credible is the theory that COVID19 escaped from a Wuhan Lab?
by Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel — 2020-04-03T06:47:08.646Z

It sounds like a conspiracy theory. Apparently, it's big on the Chinese Internet.

https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/chinese-internet-thinks-patient-zero-was-a-grad-student-at-the-wuhan-lab

which links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU

The details in the video are rather vague since I don't speak Chinese I have trouble evaluating its credibility. What do you think?
Which books provide a good overview of modern human prehistory?
by ChosunOne — 2020-04-03T06:44:34.702Z

I find the subject of the emergence of language, culture, and society to be quite fascinating. I want to build a more comprehensive model of global prehistory from approximately 200,000 - 3,000 BCE than just "hunter-gatherer societies and spoken language".

I understand that the understanding of these eras is frequently in flux due to the high degree of interpretation required and the scarcity of archaeological evidence, so I am more expecting books that try to give accurate bounds on the events of those areas and not take too many liberties with the available evidence.

Some popular books, such as Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, cover the topics I want to learn more about but I think Sapiens is not really the level of rigor for which I'm looking.
Mask wearing: do the opposite of what the CDC/WHO has been saying?
by Shmi — 2020-04-02T22:10:31.126Z

So the standard advice has been not to wear surgical masks if you have no symptoms, justified by the two mutually contradictory arguments uttered in the same breath: "they don't help" AND "healthcare workers need them". Well, it turns out that surgical masks don't help much in a hospital setting, where there is a high concentration of virus-containing aerosol, and N95 respirators or even more stringent protective equipment is needed. On the other hand, the community transmission is much more likely through droplets and surface contact, something where masks are likely to be effective against, especially to avoid infecting others, together with washing hands, disinfecting surfaces and social distancing. Goggles might be a good idea, too, to avoid accidentally touching one's eyes. In retrospect, that was pretty obvious, but hindsight is, well, 2020.
Implications of the Doomsday Argument for x-risk reduction
by  — 2020-04-02T21:42:42.810Z

Lesswrong contains a large intersection of people who are interested in x-risk reduction and people who are aware of the Doomsday Argument. Yet these two things seem to be incompatible with each other, so I'm going to ask about the elephant in the room:

What are your stances on the Doomsday Argument? Does it encourage or discourage you from working on x-risks? Is it a significant concern for you at all?

Do most people working on x-risks believe the Doomsday Argument to be flawed?

If not, it seems to me that avoiding astronomical waste is also astronomically unlikely, thus balancing out x-risk reduction to a moderately important issue for humanity at best. From an individual perspective (or altruistic perspective with future discounting), we perhaps should focus on having a good time before inevitable doom? What am I missing?
Equilibrium and prior selection problems in multipolar deployment
by JesseClifton — 2020-04-02T20:06:14.298Z

To avoid catastrophic conflict in multipolar AI scenarios, we would like to design AI systems such that AI-enabled actors will tend to cooperate. This post is about some problems facing this effort and some possible solutions. To explain these problems, I'll take the view that the agents deployed by AI developers (the ''principals'') in a multipolar scenario are moves in a game. The payoffs to a principal in this game depend on how the agents behave over time. We can talk about the equilibria of this game, and so on. Ideally, we would be able to make guarantees like this:

The payoffs resulting from the deployed agents' actions are optimal with respect to some appropriate "welfare function''. This welfare function would encode some combination of total utility, fairness, and other social desiderata;

The agents are in equilibrium --- that is, no principal has an incentive to deploy an agent with a different design, given the agents deployed by the other principals.

The motivation for item 1 is clear: we want outcomes which are fair by each of the principals' lights. In particular, we want an outcome that the principals will all agree to. And item 2 is desirable because an equilibrium constitutes a self-enforcing contract; each agent wants to play their equilibrium strategy, if they believe that the other agents are playing the same equilibrium. Thus, given that the principals all say that they will deploy agents that satisfy 1 and 2, we could have some confidence that a welfare-optimal outcome will in fact obtain.

Two simple but critical problems need to be addressed in order to make such
guarantees: the equilibrium and prior selection problems. The equilibrium selection problem is that this deployment game will have many equilibria. Even if the principals agree on a welfare function, it is possible that many different profiles of agents optimize the same welfare function. So the principals
need to coordinate on the profile of agents deployed in order to make guarantees
like 1 and 2. Moreover, the agents will probably have private information, such as information about their payoffs, technological capabilities, and so on. As I will explain below, conflicting priors about private information can lead to suboptimal outcomes. And we can’t expect agents to arrive at the same priors by default.
So a prior selection problem also has to be solved.

The equilibrium sel...
What should you do regarding footwear to protect against COVID-19?
by ChristianKl — 2020-04-02T19:28:38.193Z

From [Effectiveness of personal protective measures in prevention of nosocomial transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome]:

"Univariate analysis showed that mask, gown, gloves, goggles, footwear, "hand-washing and disinfecting", gargle, "membrane protection", "taking shower and changing clothing after work", "avoid from eating and drinking in ward", oseltamivir phospha tall had protective effects (P < 0.05), but stepwise logistic regression showed significant differences for mask (OR = 0.78, 95% CI: 0.60 - 0.99), goggles (OR = 0.20, 95% CI: 0.10 - 0.41) and footwear (OR = 0.58, 95% CI: 0.39 - 0.86). "

This paper is about protecting healthcare workers from infection with the old SARS which seems near to SARS-COV-2. Unfortunately, the main text is in Chinese so it's unclear to me what they did about footwear that was effectful.
Peter's COVID Consolidated Brief for 2 April
by Peter Wildeford — 2020-04-02T17:00:06.548Z

Happy April!

...All I can think of is that it’s hard to imagine that just three weeks ago the world felt so different than it does today. I am still following COVID-19 a lot, so here’s my second semi-regular installment of a public consolidated brief that tries to consolidate everything I read into one short, actionable list so other people don’t have to re-create my work. This way I can save time and

fight research debt

.

Maybe read this instead of spending a ton of your own time obsessing? (Though do be wary that I am not an expert by any means and may be off in my selection and interpretation.)

I have a lot more reporting that I wanted to put in here but didn’t, due to lack of time. I will get them in the next issue and I will try to send out updates as fast as I can while maintaining a certain level of quality.

I do hope news will slow down at some point. ...I certainly will slow down at some point.

Previously:

29 Mar Brief

My research questions

(27 Mar)

See also:

LessWrong links database

EA Coronavirus Facebook Group

Doing Your Part! How You Can Stay Safe and Help the Fight!

The Wikipedia page

“2019-2020 Coronavirus pandemic”

is currently the second most viewed Wikipedia page of all pages this week, with hundreds of thousands of page views. If you like reading links, it could be really helpful to add a few minutes to your day to join me in this fight and keep this and the associated pages up to date. Also update the

LessWrong links database

and the

Coronavirus Tech Handbook

. And if you see parallel efforts, make sure they are aware of each other.
~

I don’t want to wade too much into the Great Masks Debate, which feels too complicated for me to adequately analyze and summarize at the speed at which I am writing this. I am not an expert, but since some are asking, I will nonetheless briefly summarize my provisional opinion:

There is some evidence that the public should wear masks - even DIY cloth ones. See

“The evidence for everyone wearing masks, explained”

and

“Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know”

and

“SSC Journal Club: Macintyre on Face Masks”

. I am pro-mask and wear a mask when going to the grocery store.
There is a lot of bad evidence and arguments out there. Do your best to only advocate for masks using good arguments, which I do think exist. You should be just as wa

...
What is the subjective experience of free will for agents?
by Gordon Seidoh Worley — 2020-04-02T15:53:38.992Z

Jessica recently wrote about difficulties with physicalist accounts of the world and alternatives to logical counterfactuals. In my recent post about the deconfusing human values research agenda, Charlie left a comment highlighting that my current model depends on a notion of "could have done something else" to talk about decisions.

Additionally, I have a strong belief that the world is subjectively deterministic, i.e. that from my point of view the world couldn't have turned out any other way than the way it did because I only ever experience myself to be in a single causal history. Yet I also suspect this is not the whole story because it appears the world I find myself in is one of many possible causal histories, possibly realized in many causally isolated worlds after the point where they diverge (i.e. a non-collapse interpretation of quantum physics).

So this leaves me in a weird place. When thinking about values, it often make sense to think about the downstream effects of values on decisions and actions and in fact many people try to infer upstream values from observations of downstream behaviors, yet the notion of "deciding" implies there was some choice to make, which I think maybe there wasn't. Thus I have theories that conflict with each other yet seek to explain the same phenomena, so I'm confused.

Seeking to see through this confusion, what are some ways of reconciling both the experience of determinism and the experience of freedom of choice or free will?

Since this has impacts on how to think about decision theory, my hope is that people might be able to share how they've thought about this question and tried to resolve it.
Where should I give spare computing power, as an aspiring rationalist/altruist?
by 1point7point4 — 2020-04-02T15:31:27.025Z

This question is exactly what it says on the tin - today I realized that a valuable resource had been sitting in front of me this whole time, going unused for about fifteen hours a day (I'm currently struggling under a mound of homework, recovering from burnout, and learning self-improvement techniques). I'm currently thinking of a distributed computing project like Folding@Home, but if there's some project that could do more good with the resources (especially singularity-related), I'd rather contribute to that instead. (no longer endorsed by the author)
Call for volunteers: assessing Kurzweil, 2019
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2020-04-02T12:07:57.246Z

EDIT: To help assessing, go here. Cheers!

Many years ago, I helped organise an assessment of Kurzweil's predictions for 2009, in his 1999 book "The Age of Spiritual Machines". The results were mixed - I feel he had a decent track record, but it was much worse than his own self-evaluation:

Following Gwern's suggestion, let's do the same for his 2019 predictions.

Since many people have extra time on their hands, for some odd reason, I'm asking for volunteers to do this assessment. You'll be getting a certain number of predictions (how many is up to you) and giving an assessment of their correctness on a five point scale of "True", "Weakly True", "Cannot Decide", "Weakly False", and "False".

So, add a comment here if you'd like to volunteer for this assessment, or know a person/group who might want to.

Cheers!

EDIT: I've now split Kurzweil's 2019 predictions into 105 separate individual predictions.
Atari early
by KatjaGrace — 2020-04-02T06:10:03.052Z

Deepmind announced that their Agent57 beats the ‘human baseline’ at all 57 Atari games usually used as a benchmark. I think this is probably enough to resolve one of the predictions we had respondents make in our 2016 survey.

Our question was when it would be feasible to ‘outperform professional game testers on all Atari games using no game specific knowledge’.1 ‘Feasible’ was defined as meaning that one of the best resourced labs could do it in a year if they wanted to.

As I see it, there are four non-obvious things to resolve in determining whether this task has become feasible:

Did or could they outperform ‘professional game testers’?
Did or could they do it ‘with no game specific knowledge’?
Did or could they do it for ‘all Atari games’?
Is anything wrong with the result?

I. Did or could they outperform ‘professional game testers’?

It looks like yes, for at least for 49 of the games: the ‘human baseline’ seems to have come specifically from professional game testers.2 What exactly the comparison was for the other games is less clear, but it sounds like what they mean by ‘human baseline’ is ‘professional game tester’, so probably the other games meet a similar standard.

II. Did or could they do it with ‘no game specific knowledge’?

It sounds like their system does not involve ‘game specific knowledge’, under a reasonable interpretation of that term.

III. Did or could they do it for ‘all Atari games’?

Agent57 only plays 57 Atari 2600 games, whereas there are hundreds of Atari 2600 games (and other Atari consoles with presumably even more games).

Supposing that Atari57 is a longstanding benchmark including only 57 Atari games, it seems likely that the survey participants interpreted the question as about only those games. Or at least about all Atari 2600 games, rather than every game associated with the company Atari.

Interpreting it as written though, does Agent57’s success suggest that playing all Atari games is now feasible? My guess is yes, at least for Atari 2600 games.

Fifty-five of the fifty-seven games were proposed in this paper3, which describes how they chose fifty of them:

Our testing set was constructed by choosing semi-randomly from the 381 games listed on Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atari_2600_games (July 12, 2012)] at the time of writing. Of these games,

...
Building Toe Buttons
by jefftk — 2020-04-01T18:10:02.720Z

In controlling my

rhythm stage setup I have
been bringing instruments in and out by pressing buttons on my

axis 49. It has plenty of
buttons, but needing to press them with my fingers doesn't combine
well with playing mandolin. So: toe buttons!

The most common tool musicians use seems to be the FCB1010.
Not only does it have twelve buttons it has two expression pedals.
While this would be nice, it's too bulky for me: I already have many
things under my feet so I would need to move my feet too far to press
the buttons. So I built something instead:

This is my footboard v3 with its four
velocity sensitive pads, but now with six multi-color switches within
easy reach of my toes. It's velcroed on to the main section and
connects via USB:

I made it out of momentary
push-button switches and a DIY arcade
kit. It presents as a USB game controller, and I've modified my
software to read from it with IOKit calls (110743b4e).

I cut a block of wood to the right size, leaving the tops of the
buttons even with the footrest, cut a piece of plexiglass to match,
and cut through them both with a bit the same diameter as the barrel
of the switches. Then I drilled a smaller hole into that cavity for
the signal wire to come out. Here's two of the switches in place:

I built a small box to house the USB controller out of 3/4 plywood. I
didn't glue the top on, in case I later want to open it up to add
leads for additional switches. Here's the external wiring:

I've only just set it up, but being able to bring things in and out
without stopping my mandolin (both hands), kick drum (left foot), or
breath controller (mouth)
is really great!

Currently I'm only using the "press" and ignoring the "release", but
I'd like to make "press and hold" be a different signal. Possibly I'd
like something where a short press activate a mode, another short
press deactivates the mode, but a press-and-hold activates the mode
just for as long as it's held down?

Comment via: facebook
[AN #93]: The Precipice we’re standing at, and how we can back away from it
by Rohin Shah — 2020-04-01T17:10:01.987Z

Alignment Newsletter is a weekly publication with recent content relevant to AI alignment around the world. Find all Alignment Newsletter resources here. In particular, you can look through this spreadsheet of all summaries that have ever been in the newsletter.

Audio version here (may not be up yet).

HIGHLIGHTS

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Toby Ord) (summarized by Rohin): This book argues that humanity is in a special stage of its development: it is on the precipice, a narrow time during which we have enough power to destroy ourselves, but not enough wisdom to have mitigated such risks. It first argues that existential risk would be very important to reduce (for all the standard reasons), and then considers many different kinds of existential risks, finding that natural ones (asteroids, supervolcanoes, stellar explosions) are small relative to anthropogenic risks, both current (nuclear war, climate change, environmental destruction) and future (engineered pandemics, unaligned AI, dystopian scenarios). I'll focus primarily on the part about AI risk, as well as some of the comments on existential risk in general.

The AI risk presentation in the book was similar to that in Superintelligence: it argues for risk from goal-directed AI systems (though the terminology used in the book is different). It first demonstrates the strong progress in deep learning, and then notes that expert surveys estimate that AGI is more likely than not to arrive in the next century. It then notes that we don't know how to specify a reward function for an AI system (even with e.g. inverse reinforcement learning), and to the extent that we get it wrong, it pits us in competition against a superintelligent adversary. Ideas like switching off the AI system wouldn't work, due to convergent instrumental subgoals like survival.

It also considers some obvious objections, including the very reasonable objection that "AI researchers won't build something that will kill them". However, Toby is still worried, citing that due to the unilateralist curse unaligned AGI might still be built by the most optimistic researchers, and in any case the personal benefits to the researchers might justify the risk of misalignment to them personally (though it would not be justified for the world as a whole).

The book then spends some time discussing...