trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
The attack rate estimation is more important than CFR
by avturchin — 2020-04-01T16:23:12.674Z

Let’s here define the “attack rate” (AR) as a share of people in a group which was infected after an infection agent was introduced into the group. For example, it is estimated that swine flu infected 10-15 per cent of the world population in 2009-2010.

Obviously, there is a large difference between AR = 10 per cent and 80 per cent, no matter what is the infection-fatality rate (IFR), as in the first case 8 times fewer people will die.

Crude AR depends on several variables

1) Number of people which never contacted the virus at all (didn’t inhale any virus particles)

1a) Because they were well isolated.

1b) Because they were lucky.

2) The number of people who have physical contact with virus particles but never develop illness:

2a) Those who have a natural immunity to the virus, powerful immune system or special genetics.

2b) Those who have cross-immunity from some other similar viruses or vaccines.

2c) Those who already had the virus in previous time and now became a backbone of the herd immunity.

2d) Those who had so short and mild illness that was not detectable by available methods at the time like PCR, or via self-observation (maybe because of getting only very small viral load).

Attempts to estimate crude AR

It is difficult to estimate the true AR, as it also depends on circumstances, like the age of people in the group, duration of exposure, viral load.

In some cases, we could measure the crude AR, but can’t guess which of the six listed above causes explain it. For example, 712 of 3700 people on DM became ill, which gives crude AR = 19.24 per cent.

Another case: “In total, 15 members of the 58-strong crew reported sick with slight flu symptoms, including coughing and a slightly raised temperature. Tests showed eight members of the crew had or had recovered from coronavirus, the defence ministry said.” which implies crude AR = 25.8 per cent. People inside the submarine have almost no chances to escape the virus, as they are locked inside the same space for days, so it is probably an upper level of crude AR for this age group.

In another case, 9 of 48 passengers of the bus (assuming it was full) became infected, including some who were in a remote part of the bus or board after the patients departed. which implies crude AR = 19 per cent.

These groups include only a small number of chi...
A quick and crude comparison of epidemiological expert forecasts versus Metaculus forecasts for COVID-19
by Jotto999 — 2020-04-01T13:59:13.230Z

Katherine Milkman on Twitter notes how far off the epidemiological expert forecasts were in the linked sample:

https://twitter.com/katy_milkman/status/1244668082062348291

They gave an average estimate of 20,000 cases. The actual outcome was 122,653 by the stated date in the U.S. That's off by a factor of 6.13, and those were experts. Only 3 out of 18 survey respondents managed to get the actual outcome to fall in their 80% confidence interval. If they were perfectly calibrated on this one-off prediction, about 14 should've had the actual outcome fall in their 80% confidence interval. EDIT: No that's not right; Daniel Filan points out that we wouldn't expect 14 of 18 to get it in their range. Error between users in a one-off forecast is often correlated.

I was curious how this compares to the Metaculus community forecast (note: not the machine learning fed one, just the simple median prediction). Unfortunately the interface doesn't tell me the full distribution at date x, it just says what the median was at the time. If the expert central tendency was off by a factor of 6.13, how far off was it for Metaculus?

I looked into it in this document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TcG1gceeVgimr8lBTCAYUscOt_ADyuSpdmt1d6Scve8/edit?usp=sharing

Sadly a direct comparison is not really feasible, since we weren't predicting the same questions. But suppose if all predictions of importance were inputted into platforms such as the Good Judgement Project Open or Metaculus. Then making comparisons between groups could be trivial and continuous. This isn't even "experts versus non-experts". The relevant comparison is at the platform-level. It is "untrackable and unworkable one-off PDFs of somebody's projections" versus proper scoring and aggregation over time. Since Metaculus accounts can be entirely anonymous, why wouldn't we want every expert to input their forecast into a track record? That would make it possible to find out if the person is a dart-throwing chimp. You should assume half of them are.
Taking Initial Viral Load Seriously
by Zvi — 2020-04-01T10:50:00.542Z

In part a response to (Overcoming Bias): Variolation May Cut Covid19 Deaths 3-30X

Also related: This is an expansion of parts of this debate with Robin Hanson.

Epistemic Status: Thinking out loud. Food for thought. Not an expert.

Initial viral load seems likely to have a large impact on severity of Covid-19 infection. If we believe this, we should take this seriously, and evaluate both general policy and personal behavior differently in light of this information. We should also do our best to confirm or deny this hypothesis as soon as possible.

Robin Hanson and I had a debate on Sunday regarding his proposal of variolation: Deliberate Covid-19 infection of volunteers, using small viral loads, followed by isolation of those volunteers until recovery. I felt it was an excellent discussion. As with all such discussions, some key points are glossed over, lost or not stated as well as one would like in hindsight, there are areas that never come up, and one thinks of important additional things afterwards.

What evidence do we have that viral load matters?

Three classes of evidence seem strong.

The first is that we have a strong mechanism story we can tell. Viruses take time to multiply. When the immune system detects a virus it responds. If your initial viral load is low your immune system gets a head start, so you do better.

The second category is the terrible outcomes in health care workers on the front lines. Those who are dealing with the crisis first hand are dealing with lots of intense exposures to the virus. When they do catch it, they are experiencing high death rates. High viral load is the only theory I know about so far for why this is the case. Their cases are presumably handled at least as well as others, in terms of detection, testing, treatment and what the infected do themselves. The only other issue I can think of is that they might be reluctant to rest given how urgently their help is needed.

The third category is historical precedents.

Robin’s proposal for variolation is similar to what was historically done with smallpox. Parents infected their children with what they hoped was exactly the minimum dose required to get them sick enough to develop antibodies and gain immunity. Sometimes this went wrong and the child would get sick. Thus this form of inoculation was dangerous and 1%-2% of patients died. But of those who got smallpox infections in ot...
What achievements have people claimed will be warning signs for AGI?
by Richard_Ngo — 2020-04-01T10:24:12.332Z

In MIRI's March newsletter, they link this post which argues against the importance of AI safety because we haven't yet achieved a number of "canaries in the coal mines of AI". The post lists:

The automatic formulation of learning problems
Self-driving cars
AI doctors
Limited versions of the Turing test

What other sources identify warning signs for the development of AGI?
Two Alternatives to Logical Counterfactuals
by jessicata — 2020-04-01T09:48:29.619Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2020/04/01/alternatives-to-logical-counterfactuals/

The following is a critique of the idea of logical counterfactuals. The idea of logical counterfactuals has appeared in previous agent foundations research (especially at MIRI): here, here. "Impossible possible worlds" have been considered elsewhere in the literature; see the SEP article for a summary.

I will start by motivating the problem, which also gives an account for what a logical counterfactual is meant to be.

Suppose you learn about physics and find that you are a robot. You learn that your source code is "A". You also believe that you have free will; in particular, you may decide to take either action X or action Y. In fact, you take action X. Later, you simulate "A" and find, unsurprisingly, that when you give it the observations you saw up to deciding to take action X or Y, it outputs action X. However, you, at the time, had the sense that you could have taken action Y instead. You want to be consistent with your past self, so you want to, at this later time, believe that you could have taken action Y at the time. If you could have taken Y, then you do take Y in some possible world (which still satisfies the same laws of physics). In this possible world, it is the case that "A" returns Y upon being given those same observations. But, the output of "A" when given those observations is a fixed computation, so you now need to reason about a possible world that is logically incoherent, given your knowledge that "A" in fact returns X. This possible world is, then, a logical counterfactual: a "possible world" that is logically incoherent.

To summarize: a logical counterfactual is a notion of "what would have happened" had you taken a different action after seeing your source code, and in that "what would have happened", the source code must output a different action than what you actually took; hence, this "what would have happened" world is logically incoherent.

It is easy to see that this idea of logical counterfactuals is unsatisfactory. For one, no good account of them has yet been given. For two, there is a sense in which no account could be given; reasoning about logically incoherent worlds can only be so extensive before running into logical contradiction.

To extensively refute the idea, it is necessary to provide an alternative account of the motivating problem(s) which dispenses with the idea. Even if logical counterfactuals are unsatisfactory, the

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April Fools: Announcing LessWrong 3.0 – Now in VR!
by habryka — 2020-04-01T08:00:15.199Z

On this April 1st, we at LessWrong face two problems.

According to Michael Nielsen, software is a way to develop transformative tools for thought. Things like Anki and collaborative editing allow us to think new thoughts. But at LessWrong, we argue that this doesn’t go far enough.
Secondly, everyone is socially isolated, so we need to make LessWrong a far more social environment. We need to make a space that is superior to normal social reality in every measurable way.

The answer? Replace LessWrong with VR.

We’re now proud to announce the new LessWrong Frontpage, built entirely in Mozilla Hubs:

The new landing page, where you can read the core readings of the site: The Sequences, The Codex, The Methods.

The new community page, and a showcase of the amazing social interactions you can have on this platform.

And, the part you've all been waiting for: The new LessWrong Frontpage, where you can read the best recent posts.

So we’re using Mozilla Hubs. Why? Because you hear all the things about Mozilla Hubs that you do about any startup about to take off. Words like “Unusable”, “Irritating” and “An all-round terrible UI experience”. If people are saying this about your product and still using it, that means it’s got to be good.

To give some hard data on this, in a survey of a recent academic conference held on the Mozilla Hubs platform, the attendees reported the following genuine data (emphasis added):

With support from the co-chairs of the 2019 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) and the Hubs by Mozilla internal product team, we surveyed the motivations and experiences of remote attendees and discovered:

92% of all Social VR attendees would like to repeat the experience of attending a conference remotely using Hubs.

69% of all remote attendees rated the experience as very good or mostly good.

[...]

[Many] respondents reported difficulty hearing audio, poor visibility of the presentations, and lags in the presentation.

Only half of participants claimed they understood how to use the technology.

So, to be clear, of the attendees of this conference, half didn't know how to use the actual software, but almost all of them (92%!) would like to repeat the experience anyways! How much of a burning need does a product need to fill that at least 42% of your users want to continue using your product, whilst claiming not to know how to actually use your pro

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What's the expected QALY (quality-adjusted life years) loss per capita due to SARS-COV-2? QALY gain of increasing ICU capacity? Of buying new ventilators?
by  — 2020-04-01T05:42:53.881Z

In my online echo chambers and news bubbles it seems that a lot of effort worldwide is spent on obtaining more ventilators and increasing ICU capacity. Given that 75% (edit: this value might be too high; 50% might be closer to the truth, according to a comment below) of patients on ventilators die anyway, a single patient occupies an ICU bed for weeks, and that most of the dead are old or have serious pre-existing conditions, I wonder how much good that does.

I strongly suspect that more is spent on those efforts than they are worth because the reports or overwhelmed ICU units are so visually and emotionally captivating. But I'm too lazy to look up the numbers (and the QALY estimate would probably require some original modelling, which I have no experience with).

Related fun fact: Americans spend disproportionately more money on healthcare in their final years. This study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1464043/ (I haven't checked whether it's been reproduced) suggests 18-25%, depending on the source of funding. It's not as ridiculous as it sounds, though, because you don't know in advance which year is going to be the final one.
Necessity and Warrant
by namespace — 2020-04-01T03:12:55.541Z
Link: https://www.thelastrationalist.com/necessity-and-warrant.html

Literary warrant, a concept introduced by Wyndam Hulme in 1911, has the status of a principle. A subprinciple of the principle of representation, it enjoins that the vocabulary of a subject language be empirically derived from the literature it is intended to describe. This means that a literature must be determined. For Hulme, the language in question was the Library of Congress Classification (LCC), and the literature that served as warrant were the books housed in the Library of Congress. For a discipline-specific language, the literature might be defined as the canonical texts in the discipline or as the core set of documents of the discipline, as this is determined by citation frequency. Once the literature of a discipline is defined, then expressions in it indicative of aboutness become candidates for inclusion in the vocabulary of the language.
— Elaine Svenonius, The Intellectual Foundation Of Information Organization

In the previous post I discussed the concept of phenomenological necessity. Reality has a consistent ruleset on which we can base reasoning. Our expectations about reality should be based on rules and sense-data derived from reality. The extreme consistency of physics is one of the most important revelations of the 20th century: while our world is dizzying in its complexity and anti-inductive in its presentation the underlying principles are comparatively simple:

The vision I got from Democritus was of a God who was single-mindedly obsessed with enforcing a couple of rules about certain types of information you are not allowed to have under any circumstances. Some of these rules I’d already known about. You can’t have information from outside your light cone. You can’t have information about the speed and position of a particle at the same time. Others I hadn’t thought about as much until reading Democritus. Information about when a Turing machine will halt. Information about whether certain formal systems are consistent. Precise information about the quantum state of a particle. The reason God hasn’t solved world poverty yet is that He is pacing about feverishly worried that someone, somewhere, is going to be able to measure the quantum state of a particle too precisely, and dreaming up new and increasingly bizarre ways He can prevent that from ha

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How special are human brains among animal brains? 
by zhukeepa — 2020-04-01T01:35:36.995Z

Humans are capable of feats of cognition that appear qualitatively more sophisticated than those of any other animals. Is this appearance of a qualitative difference indicative of human brains being essentially more complex than the brains of any other animal? Or is this “qualitative difference” illusory, with the vast majority of human cognitive feats explainable as nothing more than a scaled-up version of the cognitive feats of lower animals?

“How special are human brains among animal brains?” is one of the background variables in my framework for AGI timelines. My aim for this post is not to present a complete argument for some view on this variable, so much as it is to:

present some considerations I’ve encountered that shed light on this variable
invite a collaborative effort among readers to shed further light on this variable (e.g. by leaving comments about considerations I haven’t included, or pointing out mistakes in my analyses)

Does mastery of language make humans unique?

Human conscious experience may have emerged from language

Humans seem to have much higher degrees of consciousness and agency than other animals, and this may have emerged from our capacities for language. Helen Keller (who was deaf and blind since infancy, and only started learning language when she was 6) gave an autobiographical account of how she was driven by blind impetuses until she learned the meanings of the words “I” and “me”:

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a bla

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FLI Podcast: The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity with Toby Ord
by Palus Astra — 2020-04-01T01:02:29.506Z

Toby Ord’s “The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity" has emerged as a new cornerstone text in the field of existential risk. The book presents the foundations and recent developments of this budding field from an accessible vantage point, providing an overview suitable for newcomers. For those already familiar with existential risk, Toby brings new historical and academic context to the problem, along with central arguments for why existential risk matters, novel quantitative analysis and risk estimations, deep dives into the risks themselves, and tangible steps for mitigation. "The Precipice" thus serves as both a tremendous introduction to the topic and a rich source of further learning for existential risk veterans. Toby joins us on this episode of the Future of Life Institute Podcast to discuss this definitive work on what may be the most important topic of our time.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-An overview of Toby's new book
-What it means to be standing at the precipice and how we got here
-Useful arguments for why existential risk matters
-The risks themselves and their likelihoods
-What we can do to safeguard humanity's potential

You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2020/03/31/he-precipice-existential-risk-and-the-future-of-humanity-with-toby-ord/

Transcript:

Lucas Perry: Welcome to the Future of Life Institute Podcast. I’m Lucas Perry. This episode is with Toby Ord and covers his new book “The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.” This is a new cornerstone piece in the field of existential risk and I highly recommend this book for all persons of our day and age. I feel this work is absolutely critical reading for living an informed, reflective, and engaged life in our time. And I think even for those well acquainted with this topic area will find much that is both useful and new in this book. Toby offers a plethora of historical and academic context to the problem, tons of citations and endnotes, useful definitions, central arguments for why existential risk matters that can be really helpful for speaking to new people about this issue, and also novel quantitative analysis and risk estimations, as well as what we can actually do to help mitigate these risks. So, if you’re a regular listener to this podcast,...
Meta-preferences two ways: generator vs. patch
by Charlie Steiner — 2020-04-01T00:51:49.086Z

In my last post (Gricean communication and meta-preferences), I talked about the infinite tower of meta-preferences that in principle could be applied by humans. Example meta-preference: "I'd rather that I didn't act like I want to watch a bunch of random youtube videos - that's not a 'real' preference, it's something I should change." And then you can have meta-meta-feelings about this meta-preference, and off you go.

This infinite tower can't fit into reality, so it has to be dealt with somehow if we want to include the effects of meta-preferences in the process of value learning. Now, it's possible to deny this premise, model humans as actually only being able to compute a finite number of levels, and imitate that finite number of levels perfectly. But if we want to avoid the reductio that value learning should aim for perfect human imitation, I think there are two different camps here.

The generator camp treats each level of meta-preferences as an important generator of the level below. The infinite regress is avoided by using the fact that all levels of the tower are computed by the same mind, so incorporating meta-ethics is about approximating a fixed point of this self-ratification process. Preferably finding a fixed point that makes judgements sort of like humans' in easy cases. I think one can make a very good case for this, and that it's sort of hinted at in IDA approaches.

But my preferred approach is to treat the higher meta-levels as patches to the object level. That is, finding some approximation scheme where the meta-preferences are corrections that rapidly converge. Unlike the generator framework, different levels in the patch framework can be different parts of a heterogeneous values model, rather than being different questions posed to a single agent model.

One way of thinking about patches

In brainstorming for this post, I went through a bunch of patch ideas that won't work (happy to talk about those if prompted). But here's a way of thinking by making the analogy to semi-supervised learning (similar to the ideas used in "What's the dream for giving natural language commands to AI?") that might be productive:

To say it too-simply, imagine just asking the AI to include meta-preferences. If we "ask" (in quotes because we might be talking about promptin...