trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Prolonging life is about the optionality, not about the immortality
by George3d6 — 2020-05-01T07:41:16.559Z
Link: https://blog.cerebralab.com/Prolonging_life_is_about_the_optionality,_not_about_the_immortality

There is no such thing as death. No, there’s the fear of death, and that is an awful fear. Sometimes it even makes people do things they shouldn’t. But how different things would be if only we could stop fearing death.

It has come to my attention that, although I themed this blog after a Swedish movie, with hopes of tackling transhumanism related topics, those themes have been awfully absent from my writing. To address this, I might as well aim at two warblers with one shilling and talk about human longevity from the standpoint of a Swedish movie (granted, it was made by a Russian, but such are the concessions I have to make).

An awful lot of people seem to be inherently against the idea of prolonging human life, prolonging it in the sense of figuring out ways to affect our cellular machinery or transfer out of our bodies, to grant us indefinite youth. I contrast this with the cruel mockery of “prolonging”, advocated and practiced by our medical systems, which serves only to make sure our demise is infernally long and sprinkled with horrible physical and emotional pain.

Some typical arguments for and against prolonging youth are:

Counter: You can’t reach a sweet spot where you provide de facto immortality to everyone, without controlling our individual right to create new humans on a whim. Any compromise on this topic is such that it would result in a society collapsing.

Pro: De facto immortality is so great from a utilitarian standpoint (i.e. a few hundreds of millions of times better than managing to eradicate every single pathogen-induced disease, in terms of years-of-life saved), that it’s worth trying to achieve it

in spite of the risk.

Counter: Humans would no longer be human, the finitude of our condition is an essential part of the good life. Prolonging youth would twist us into things which as grotesque and horrible, human-looking, but nothing like what we are.

Pro: Humans that live for a very long time, would have much higher stakes in everything. People don’t care about e.g. the climate when they are old, because they will be dead in a few dozen years anyway. Or, to put it on a higher level, people discount tail risks because of their short life. Immortal humans would have already destroyed all nuclear weapons except those needed to arm their well-tested asteroid defense system...
[U.S. Specific] Criminal Justice Reform in the Time of Covid-19
by KiranChokshi — 2020-05-01T05:29:08.575Z

I've been following LessWrong for some time now, but this is my first post. Looking to start a conversation around prison communications, the private prisons industry, and US criminal justice system reform.

I've started working for Ameelio (ameelio.org), a non-profit technology company committed to transforming the criminal justice system. Founded by Yale students, Ameelio focuses on improving prison communications technologies. Users can letters to any prison facility in the country, make video calls, send e-messages, & explore data, for free. All of our services are free of charge. We are open-source.

Just zooming out to see the scale of the problem. Over 2 million Americans are incarcerated. 10% of Americans have an incarcerated loved one. Prison is a revolving door - US has very high recidivism. Research shows that increased contact with loved ones reduces recidivism.

Prison telecommunications companies (e.g. Securus, GTL) have monopolies and make billions charging inflated prices to contact incarcerated loved ones.

Average family with incarcerated loved one - $13K in debt
Forced to pay up to $1.22 per minute phone call

In only a month after launch, we are now sending 300+ letters a day through the platform. People just type their message and it is sent to their incarcerated loved one free of charge.

Covid-19 makes staying connected all the more important. We predict the next 2 years to see the greatest cumulative release of inmates in US history due to crippled state budgets and virus transmission inside prisons. States like New Jersey have already announced the release of 1,000 inmates.

What are your thoughts on prison communications, the private prisons industry, and US criminal justice system reform? What could be better? Is it a way for private companies to prey on society's most vulnerable, or do companies like Securus play an important role in our country's future?

And what are your priors on how coronavirus will affect socioeconomic disparities in the United States?
Value of building an online "knowledge web" 
by Joe Kwon — 2020-05-01T04:31:24.265Z

Please excuse my naivety, would really like to hear from more knowledgable people about this.

I recently discovered a note-taking website called Roam which allows you to create pages, take bullet point notes in those pages, and use double brackets around phrases and words to create a new, doubly linked page. When you do this, you can see the all the connected pages in a visual; a graph where each node is a page. I think this tool is valuable because it allows me to externalize the connectedness of ideas and concepts with clarity.

I'm wondering why a tool like this hasn't been popularized, especially as a tool for quicker onboarding for people who want to learn about something very quickly? I want to know what I'm overlooking. It seems to me that having an organization of notes like this, with the most important TL;DRs and links to papers and websites for additional info for those interested in learning more, would save a lot of time and help create an understanding of how various ideas relate. Additionally, wouldn't a structure like this help with understanding how to build AI from an engineering perspective? Breaking down the desired functionalities into sub-topics, having an idea of how to put certain functionalities together, etc.

I'm an undergrad that learned about AI Safety through my school EA group. I've spent a lot of time in the past year trying to learn about this space and how I can contribute to it (from a cogsci->theory of mind->utility inference /value alignment perspective). A nontrivial amount of that time was spent on finding+identifying good information from various sources: mainly from LW/AN/80k/FHI/OpenAI pubs/Deepmind pubs... -- while attempting to piece the relationship of the subtopics all together.

In a sense, I found even the very roughly structured bibliography by CHAI (https://humancompatible.ai/bibliography) to be my main source of understanding how I could categorize the different work and ideas in AI Safety. Wouldn't building up a knowledge web on a platform like this be valuable in allowing a faster onboarding process, and making the field more accessible to people? I imagine it would be a lot easier for aspiring independent researchers without heavy technical and research backgrounds (like myself) to get caught up and work on projects. There would be more room and structure on plausible...
Topological metaphysics: relating point-set topology and locale theory
by jessicata — 2020-05-01T03:57:11.899Z
Link: https://unstableontology.com/2020/05/01/topological-metaphysics-relating-point-set-topology-and-locale-theory/

The following is an informal exposition of some mathematical concepts from Topology via Logic, with special attention to philosophical implications. Those seeking more technical detail should simply read the book.

There are, roughly, two ways of doing topology:

Point-set topology: Start with a set of points. Consider a topology as a set of subsets of these points which are "open", where open sets must satisfy some laws.

Locale theory: Start with a set of opens (similar to propositions), which are closed under some logical operators (especially and and or), and satisfy logical relations.

What laws are satisfied?

For point-set topology: The empty set and the full set must both be open; finite intersections and infinite unions of opens must be open.

For local theory: "True" and "false" must be opens; the opens must be closed under finite "and" and infinite "or"; and some logical equivalences must be satisfied, such that "and" and "or" work as expected.

Roughly, open sets and opens both correspond to verifiable propositions. If X and Y are both verifiable, then both "X or Y" and "X and Y" are verifiable; and, indeed, even countably infinite disjunctions of verifiable statements are verifiable, by exhibiting the particular statement in the disjunction that is verified as true.

What's the philosophical interpretation of the difference between point-set topology and locale theory, then?

Point-set topology corresponds to the theory of possible worlds. There is a "real state of affairs", which can be partially known about. Open sets are "events" that are potentially observable (verifiable). Ontology comes before epistemology. Possible worlds are associated with classical logic and classical probability/utility theory.

Local theory corresponds to the theory of situation semantics. There are facts that are true in a particular situation, which have logical relations with each other. The first three lines of Wittgenstein's Tracatus Logico-Philosophicus are: "The world is everything that is the case. / The world is the totality of facts, not of things. / The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts." Epistemology comes before ontology. Situation semantics is associated with intuitionist logic and Jeffrey-Bolker utility theory (recently discussed by Abram Demski).

Thus, they correspond to fairly different metaphysics. Can these different meta

...
Reopen Protest Sign Survey
by jefftk — 2020-05-01T03:40:02.370Z

With the protests to end the lockdowns, the main pictures I've seen
in my social media bubble have been ones with signs like
"

I
need a haircut" or "

Let
my People Golf". So it's not surprising that people would be
writing responses like

annacaffeina's:

People aren't out protesting to be waitresses and hairdressers
again. People are out demanding that their waitresses and hairdressers
go back to work. The idea is to force the service industry to serve
them despite the risk to the servers.

This seemed unlikely to me: the financial strain of not being able to
work is something I've seen my conservative friends posting about a
lot. Since the signs we see are generally coming through multiple
layers of filters, primarily for being interesting and controversial,
I wanted to try and get a more representative sample of what people
actually had on their signs.

I ran an image search for [reopen protests] and looked for pictures
that had a lot of signs. I picked ones that had as many legible signs
as possible, and where it didn't look like the photographer was trying
to feature a specific sign. I ended up with the text of 71 signs.

Most of the signs were generic pro-reopening ones ("Reopen NC", "Stop
the Shutdown"). The most common theme was the constitution ("Gov't
can't Suspend the Constitution", "1st Amendment - The right to
peacably assemble", "We The People") with nine signs, followed by
references to tyranny ("Tyranny Is When You Restrict The Movement Of
Healthy People", "Tyranny Calls Itself Safety") and freedom ("Free
People Make Free Choices", "We Demand Freedom") with six each.

On the motivating question, I counted four signs about wanting to work
("Let Us Work / Let Us Live", "Re-Open NC /Let Us Get Back To Work",
"We Want to Work", and "If It Pleases The Crown May We Go To Work"),
three about wanting to let others work for their own benefit
("We can do Both / Save Lives / Save Jobs", "Poverty Kills", "Let'Em
Work / Let'Em Live"), and none about wanting others to go back to
work for one's own benefit.

Here's the full list:

Wyoming
Protest (18):

Reopen Wyoming Now!!

Re-open Wyoming

We can do Both
Save Lives
Save Jobs

Stop the Shutdown

God Gives Gov't Takes

Life of Lock-up

Gov't can't Suspend the Constitution

Stop following other States
Wyoming is full of Leaders
Let's Lead

Faith Over Fear

Keep Wyoming Eco

...
FLI Podcast: On Superforecasting with Robert de Neufville
by Palus Astra — 2020-04-30T23:08:20.159Z

Essential to our assessment of risk and ability to plan for the future is our understanding of the probability of certain events occurring. If we can estimate the likelihood of risks, then we can evaluate their relative importance and apply our risk mitigation resources effectively. Predicting the future is, obviously, far from easy — and yet a community of "superforecasters" are attempting to do just that. Not only are they trying, but these superforecasters are also reliably outperforming subject matter experts at making predictions in their own fields. Robert de Neufville joins us on this episode of the FLI Podcast to explain what superforecasting is, how it's done, and the ways it can help us with crucial decision making.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-What superforecasting is and what the community looks like
-How superforecasting is done and its potential use in decision making
-The challenges of making predictions
-Predictions about and lessons from COVID-19

You can find the page for this podcast here: futureoflife.org/2020/04/30/on-su…rt-de-neufville/

You can take a survey about the podcast here: www.surveymonkey.com/r/W8YLYD3

You can submit a nominee for the Future of Life Award here: futureoflife.org/future-of-life-a…ung-hero-search/

Transcript

Lucas Perry: Welcome to the Future of Life Institute Podcast. I’m Lucas Perry. Today we have a conversation with Robert de Neufville about superforecasting. But, before I get more into the episode I have two items I’d like to discuss. The first is that the Future of Life Institute is looking for the 2020 recipient of the Future of Life Award. For those not familiar, the Future of Life Award is a $50,000 prize that we give out to an individual who, without having received much recognition at the time of their actions, has helped to make today dramatically better than it may have been otherwise. The first two recipients were Vasili Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, two heroes of the nuclear age. Both took actions at great personal risk to possibly prevent an all-out nuclear war. The third recipient was Dr. Matthew Meselson, who spearheaded the international ban on bioweapons. Right now, we’re not sure who to give the 2020 Future of Life Award to. That’s where you come in. If you know of an unsung hero who has helped to avoid global catastrophic dis...
"God Rewards Fools"
by Czynski — 2020-04-30T22:51:41.974Z

In an otherwise gripping but misleading book about the history of cryptography called The Code Book, by Simon Singh, there is a quote from one of the two inventors of Diffie-Hellman key exchange which has stuck with me two decades later. (I've been unable to determine whether it was Diffie or Hellman; sources conflict and I no longer own the book.)

…the way to get to the top of the heap in terms of developing original research is to be a fool, because only fools keep trying. You have idea number 1, you get excited, and it flops. The you have idea number 2, you get excited, and it flops. Then you have idea number 99, you get excited, and it flops. Only a fool would be excited by the 100th idea, but it might take 100 ideas before one really pays off. Unless you’re foolish enough to be continually excited, you won’t have the motivation, you won’t have the energy to carry it through. God rewards fools.

I am a habitual naysayer, like many people in this community. Recently, I've been thinking about this in the context of holiday and ritual design, which is my primary preoccupation in terms of contributing to the rationalist project. As I've written about recently, this is an extremely high-risk, high-reward enterprise; the upside potential is substantial but the downside potential is enormous. Which means that many ideas are needed before you get something that's +EV to actually try and implement, and many of those attempts will be needed before you get something that's +EV to try and sustain. I'd guess that 1000 ideas : 100 fleshed-out ideas : 10 meatspace attempts : 1 sustainable result is about right.

This has a couple important consequences:

Most current holidays are probably not good enough.

Ray Arnold and others possess the incredibly vital capacity of actually doing things rather than waiting for something perfect. However, this is in accordance with the old Facebook motto: "Move fast and break things." They move fast, but they will, accordingly, break things. Which for Facebook meant "we will sometimes ship code that breaks the site" and here means "we will sometimes establish holidays and rituals which are not actually good for our community". Years of iteration have improved several MVPs which were probably -EV initially into fleshed-ou...
Generalized Efficient Markets and Academia
by johnswentworth — 2020-04-30T21:59:56.285Z

Generalized efficient markets (GEM) says that low-hanging fruit has already been picked. If there were some easy way to reliably make a fortune on the stock market, it would have already been done, and the opportunity would be gone. If some obvious theory explained all the known data on some phenomenon better than the current mainstream theory, that theory would already have been published and widely adopted. If there were some simple way to build a better, cheaper mousetrap, it would already be on the market.

Look back - one of those three is not like the others.

One nice property of markets is that it only takes a small number of people to remove an inefficiency. Once the better, cheaper mousetrap hits the market, the old mousetraps become obsolete; the new mousetrap is adopted even if there are initially many more old-mousetrap-makers than new-mousetrap-makers. Same with the stock market: even if most investors don’t notice a pattern, it only takes a handful to notice the opportunity and remove it. Competition drives market-beating profits to zero with only a handful of competitors, even if everyone else in the market misses the opportunity.

But academia is a different story.

In order for a theory to be adopted within an academic field, most people in the field must recognize the theory’s advantages. If a theory has fatal flaw which most people in the field won’t understand (e.g. because of insufficient mathematical fluency), it doesn’t matter how comprehensively fatal the flaw is, the theory won’t be dropped until some easier-to-understand evidence comes along (e.g. direct experimental refutation of the theory). A handful of people who understand the problem might sound the alarm, but that won’t be enough social signal to stand out from the constant social noise of people arguing for/against the theory in other ways.

Some examples of ways this might happen:

Most people in the field don’t understand statistical significance
Most people in the field don’t understand confounding
Most people in the field can’t distinguish a predictive theory from

phlogiston

Most people in the field don’t have a notion of

gears

/

causality

, or don’t see why it matters
Most people in the field don’t understand

equilibrium reasoning

Now, as long as people in the field recognize the importance of correctly pr...
Seasonality of COVID-19, Other Coronaviruses, and Influenza
by Radford Neal — 2020-04-30T21:43:19.522Z
Link: https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/seasonality-of-covid-19-other-coronaviruses-and-influenza/#more-2848

This is a link to a post on my blog regarding seasonality of COVID-19, and its implications for some low cost but possibly high impact interventions.
Covid-19 4/30: Stuck in Limbo
by Zvi — 2020-04-30T20:40:00.619Z

Epistemic Status: As with all my Covid-19 posts I’m not any kind of expert and am doubtless making a lot of mistakes. Yet it seems worthwhile to persist.

In previous posts I’ve been focused my direct modeling on New York. That was for various reasons. It’s the epicenter, it’s where I live, it is the place where herd immunity potentially matters already, and data is better than trying to reconcile 50 different states.

Now it’s time to start fully expanding that to the country. Wikipedia’s data is slightly different than my main source, and has the more generally fatal weakness that it doesn’t provide the negative test counts, but it provides it in easier-to-access form for deaths and infections, so I’m going to use it for the following charts I created (see calculations in my spreadsheet here).

Deaths by Week in the Big 5 Regions:

WEST
MIDWEST
SOUTH
NORTHEAST ex-NY
NY

Mar 19 – Mar 25
164
450
182
143
364

Mar 26 – Apr 1
424
1894
667
856
1988

Apr 2-8
764
3873
1331
2248
4694

Apr 9-15
890
4853
1596
3605
5318

Apr 16-22
1033
5189
1727
5165
3716

Apr 23-29
1128
5234
1694
4742
2666

Positive tests by Week in the Big 5 Regions:

WEST
MIDWEST
SOUTH
NORTHEAST ex-NY
NY

Mar 19-Mar 25
7176
7812
9927
11923
33106

Mar 26 – Apr 1
16665
22121
28412
37339
55123

Apr 2-8
19925
31460
38989
60433
67556

Apr 9-15
16291
29267
35570
62293
64463

Apr 16-22
20065
34130
33932
65080
43437

Apr 23-29
21873
42343
34683
62355
42475

Tests each week:

USA Pos%
USA ex-NY Pos %
NY Pos %
USA Tests
USA ex-NY Tests
NY Tests

Mar 19-25
16.2%
10.7%
32.0%
347577
258695
88882

Mar 26-Apr 1
20.2%
15.4%
45.1%
728474
611073
117401

Apr 2-8
19.8%
15.8%
45.5%
1067220
922947
144273

Apr 9-15
20.1%
16.5%
40.1%
1039790
878931
160859

Apr 16-22
15.7%
13.8%
30.2%
1253535
1109565
143970

Apr 23-29
13.7%
12.6%
21.0%
1480101
1277602
202499

For completeness, the total positive tests:

USA Positives
USA Ex-NY Positives

Mar 26-Apr 1
56198
27769

Mar 19-Mar 25
146888
93987

Apr 2-8
211095
145491

Apr 9-15
209067
144604

Apr 16-22
197111
153674

Apr 23-29
202934
160459

I decided to go by week because reporting on different days of the week is different. Tuesdays and Wednesdays have a bigger share, while weekends have lower shares. There’s also a lot of day-to-day noise in general. Number of tests fluctuates wildly. By combining weeks, we get a...