trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Fisherian Runaway as a decision-theoretic problem
by Bunthut — 2021-03-20T16:34:42.649Z

Introducing what I think may be an interesting toy problem for timeless-like considerations.

The Fisherian Runaway is a proposed mechanism for the development of apparently-detrimental ornamentation such as peacock tails. It goes something like this: You start out with females being selective about their mates. They develop some form of evaluation system to select for fitness in their mates. Then, a male with some new trait comes along. For whatever reason, the existing fitness-evaluation system rates this trait very highly. The male finds many mates and has many offspring. His sons will also carry the new trait, and will similarly have more offspring than replacement. The trait will spread through the population. Then, a female which weighs the trait stronger in its fitness-evaluation comes along. She mates with carriers of the new trait more than other females, and consequently her sons will disproportionately carry the trait and disproportionately reproduce. Some of their children will be female, and they inherit the new evaluation from their grandmother (just like her direct daughters, but theres only a proportionate amount of those). The new evaluation will spread through the population. If the trait is continuous like tail length, this can lead to yet stronger selection for the trait, which will lead to yet higher requirements for it in mates, etc.

Notice that this doesn't really depend on what the trait is. If it had no effect outside the females evaluation, it could still happen and intensify indefinitely (or at least until it stops having no side effects). If it is otherwise detrimental, the benefit in reproduction can still outweigh that more or less indefinitely, or at least until it gets so bad that females can't find even one male with the detrimental trait anymore.

Now, intuitively it seems that there is something going wrong here. Traits become attractive based on nothing other than that they are attractive. The challenge is to make this intuition precise, and formally define the boundary of the problematic behaviour. This is surprisingly hard. I will outline some approaches and how they fail.

"Real" Fitness

A first response might be that if the females were better in selecting for fitness this wouldn't happen. But it's not clear they're making any mistakes in this: fitness just is the expected number of offspring after all, and the trait they were...
What are the best resources to point people who are skeptical of getting vaccinated for COVID-19 to?
by ChristianKl — 2021-03-20T11:18:52.089Z

There are some people who won't be convinced no matter what but on the other hand there are people who might be conviced to vaccinate against COVID-19 who are currently not planning to be vaccinated. What are the best online resources to point non-rationalists towards to convince them that getting vaccinated is a good idea?
Jean Monnet: The Guerilla Bureaucrat
by Martin Sustrik — 2021-03-20T10:37:27.466Z

I have written about coordination problems from various points of view in the past (biology, economics, sociology, political science) but this time I am about to focus not on the theory, but on the practice.

Jean Monnet was one of the founding fathers of the European Union. One may even say that he was the architect of the European Union. However, as founding fathers go, he was rather unusual. His background was unusual: He was neither a political leader, nor a lawyer, a philosopher or a military commander. He was a son of a brandy merchant from the small town of Cognac near Bordeaux and himself a merchant by trade. He dropped out of school at sixteen and never got any extensive formal education.

But also his approach was unusual: He never held an elected position, he has never put himself to the forefront, he almost never made big speeches and is not known for memorable quotations. Rather, he was always in the background, busy with the boring technical work, hanging around politicians, showing them his famous balance sheets and trying to convince them to do the sensible, if unexpected, thing.

He was, in fact, so undistinguished that, when Fortune magazine run a story about him, they have given up on inventing a proper title for him and introduced him simply as "Monsieur Jean Monnet of Cognac". But whoever he was in his life - a trader, a banker, a civil servant - the only description that truly fits is that he was a solver of coordination problems.

The Monnet Method

This article will explore what Mario Draghi (former president of European Central Bank, and now, quite unexpectedly, the Italian prime minister) calls "the Monnet method", a bunch of principles that guided the effort to unite the continent divided by centuries of incessant wars and feuds.

But while Draghi is focusing on the lessons that may be relevant in the current state of the European Union, my interest is a bit broader: How does one solve coordination problems in general? And how does to do it as successfully as Jean Monnet once did?

In this article we are going to examine that question. Yet, before we begin, a warning is due. Monnet himself, in his memoirs, refuses to write down his method:

I might have written a series of practical maxims; but I distrust general ideas, and I never let them lead me far away from practical things. I have described the dramatic events I have lived through and th

...
Is January AI a real thing?
by Ericf — 2021-03-20T00:10:17.253Z

Does anyone have experience or information about continuous glucose monitoring from "January AI"?
https://january.ai/?utm_source=GoogleSearchNetwork&utm_campaign=12001902471&utm_content=121683842811&utm_term=492950869595&utm_medium=continuous glucose monitoring system-b&gclid=Cj0KCQjwl9GCBhDvARIsAFunhsk1iEFoN8X0QJGsifMUTKgcjuTmDwUzLaOuqN-sXsa2wiYHtzcReTwaAtLSEALw_wcB
Babble Challenge: 50 Ways to Overcome Impostor Syndrome
by Tim Liptrot — 2021-03-19T18:21:21.995Z

Here we go again. Time to become stronger.

This week’s challenge:

Imagine you are a bright young PhD student with interesting articles to write. You have picked your journals, developed the thesis, and are hard at work dratfting publications.

But there's one problem. You have impostor syndrome. You often feel like your ideas are bad, or that you are unqualified, or should only write about one very narrow area. When you examine each doubt, they are clearly unfounded. Impostor syndrome slows down your progress during day long mood swings.

Give me 50 ideas to solve impostor syndrome!

Rules

Rules from JacobJacob's babble challenges

50 answers please

Post answers inside spoiler tags

Not all you ideas have to work ("feel better" or "go for a walk" are great answers)

When your stuck, say something stupid.

If you spend 5 min agonising over not having anything to say, you’re doing it wrong. You’re being too critical. Just lower your standards and say something, anything. Soon enough you’ll be back on track.

Go get them tiger!

I will post my attempt at 5:30 EST today
Feelings of Admiration, Ruby <=> Miranda
by Ruby — 2021-03-19T16:12:35.577Z

This is the seventh section of the wedding ceremony of Ruby & Miranda. See the Sequence introduction for more info. Ruby and Miranda each speak in this section.

NO IMAGE PROJECTED. COMPLETE DARKNESS.

Miranda descends from podium.

Brienne: Any alliance can strengthen us. These two are not merely be allies. They've chosen each other for something much closer than that, and they've chosen carefully.

I invite the betrothed to express, as best they can through the inadequate medium of human speech, what each member of this partnership means to the other.

Ruby and Miranda ascend the podium, face each other.

IMAGE 6 PROJECTED ON PLANETARIUM

The Carina Nebula, a region of massive star formation in the southern skies.

Brienne: Ruby, you may speak.

Ruby commences admiration speech.

There is a name I call Miranda. It is not ‘honey’, ‘cutie-pie’ or anything of the sort. I call her ‘Braveheart’. Yes, this name is used elsewhere for someone rather different from Miranda and for rather different reasons. That does not matter. To me, this name captures who she is.

We speak here of all that must be done, of the bad things which must be stopped and the heights towards which we can strive. These aims are natural to me. From youth, I was told that the world was created for me, that I was God’s chosen, my purpose to transform the world according to his will. I always knew that I was important and responsible. This didn’t bother me; my pride demanded that I be significant, and while my responsibilities weighed on me, there was no question that I would take them.

Miranda is different. She does not seek greatness, grandeur, or importance. She does not need to be a hero. For a long time it was her plan to live in one town, have a few kids, be a nurse for forty years. That simple life would satisfy almost all of her. And she would tell you that in another world, it is the life she would like to live. She will say that it has been hard, all those around her telling her that she cannot live out her dream, that being a nurse isn’t enough, that she could be more, should be more, must be more.

The instinct might be to turn back, walk away from those pushing her. Go, and stay in her small town, be the best nurse she could be, for she doesn’t need to be a hero. But Miranda didn’t do that. While it is counter to so much of her, she did not ignore the call that she was needed. So much need...
Some blindspots in rationality and effective altruism
by Remmelt — 2021-03-19T11:40:05.618Z

Lighter reading here.

Update: appreciating Scott Alexander’s humble descriptions in his recent Criticism of Criticism of Criticism post. A clarification I need to make is that the blindspot-brightspot distinctions below are not about prescribing ’EAs’ to be eg. less individualistic (although there is an implicit preference, with non-elaborated-on reasoning, which Scott also seems to have in the other direction). The distinctions are attempts at categorising where (covering aspects of the environment) people in involved in our broader community incline to focus on more (‘brightspots’) relative to other communities, as well as what corresponding representational assumptions we are making in our mental models, descriptions, and explanations. The distinctions also form a basis for prescribing the community to not just make hand-wavy gestures of ‘we should be open to criticism’, but to actually zone in on different aspects other communities notice and could complement our sensemaking in, if we manage to build epistemic bridges to their perspectives. Ie. listen in a way where we do not keep misinterpreting what they are saying within our default frames of thinking (criticism is not useful if we keep talking past each other). I highlighted where we are falling short and other communities could contribute value.

Last month, Julia Galef interviewed Vitalik Buterin. Their responses to Glen Weyl’s

critiques of the EA community

struck me as missing perspectives he had tried to raise.

So I emailed Julia to share my thoughts. Cleaned-up text below:

Personally, I thought Vitalik’s and your commentary on Glen Weyl’s characterisation of the EA and rationality community missed something important.

Glen spent a lot of time interacting with people from the black community and other cultural niches and asking for their perspectives. He said that he learned more from that than from the theoretical work he did before.
To me, Glen’s criticism came across as unnuanced (eg. EAs also donate to GiveDirectly, and it’s not like we force people to take what we give them). I also resonate with that critiques of rationality and EA often seem unfair and devoid of reason. They lack specific examples and arguments relating to what the community actually does, and come across as a priori judgements of our community being cold, reductionist and weird. It’s also frustratin

...
Ads are everywhere, and it's not okay
by damiensnyder — 2021-03-19T05:43:59.939Z

[Crossposted from damiensnyder.com.]

Author's note: Thanks to the commenters who have pointed out some weaknesses in my argument I didn't think of. I still endorse the majority of this argument, but I don't think this was the best way to express it. (An earlier post I drafted on this same topic emphasized the time people spend on TV and the internet, and I think that thread of argument was more compelling.) I remain very frustrated by advertising: consider how many thousands of talented individuals spend their entire workday trying to get people to watch more ads, a thing no one likes to do. But where I ignore ad-free video / streaming subscription services, and to a lesser extent ad-free news, this argument is weaker. I may write another post explaining the world-model behind my view on ads in more detail. Thanks again for the feedback.

Have you noticed that everything is covered in ads?

Not everything. You can go entire days without seeing an advertisement. But you can't do that if you plan on watching TV, browsing the internet, or taking public transit. Let's review some everyday sources of entertainment, and where you can expect them to show you ads:

Sports

Ads are ingrained into every detail of the sports experience. (For non-sports fans, you will have to follow along and imagine.)

You go to the game. You might drive, and see billboards on your way. You could take a bus or train, the inside and outside of which are covered in ads and occasionally PSAs. Then you get into the stadium. If you pick up a program, it will likely have ads in it. When you get to your seat, you might see ads surrounding the stadium wherever there aren't seats. The players will walk out, and their jerseys may have ads too. (If not, they might have a sponsorship deal with the company that made their uniforms.) If you're not watching soccer, the action will be interrupted every ten minutes so they can show ads to the people watching from home. Even if the people watching from home record the game so they can fast-forward through these commercials, they will probably still see advertisements on screen during the game, and maybe have announcers read more brand taglines between their commentary. At larger breaks in the action, a lucky row could win free coupons, or a lucky fan could get the chance to win a sponsored prize. The viewers at home will get a halftime show littered with even ...
Asking questions to fulfill expectations
by erkenbrand — 2021-03-19T02:27:30.979Z

Recently I made an observation: In educational contexts, such as schools or universities, pupils and students are sometimes encouraged to ask questions. A special time slot is prepared where someone looks expectant in the room, waiting for someone to raise their hand or voice.

My observation, from my own behavior and from others, was that this is often seen as another exercise by the students. So instead of really thinking about what interests them and what they want to know or understand they ask questions about which they think that their teacher would like to hear them or that they are 'the kind of questions that one is expected to ask in this situation/to this topic'. Also I think staring expectantly in the room seems to encourage people ask any kind of question, no matter how uninterested in the answer they might be, just to avoid the uncomfortable silence.

Does anyone know what I mean and/or knows where this has been described before? And how can you encourage more creative and genuinely interested questions. Or is this just something that people like me do, who are quite used and trained in appealing to educational authorities (General critique on the incentives in the school system...) and I need to be more aware of my motives of asking questions?
Voting-like mechanisms which address size of preferences?
by abramdemski — 2021-03-18T23:23:55.393Z

First, a few motivating scenarios.

1: Legislative Deadlock

A legislature consists of a split two-party system, with 50 Morlocks and 50 Eloi.

Morlocks run all the machinery which produces important goods such as clothing. They really want worker rights, such as vacation time, air conditioning, etc. Also, they enjoy eating Eloi.

Eloi really want to pass an anti-cannibalism bill. They are also mildly against passing the Morlock worker-rights bill.

For the sake of argument, let's say the Morlocks get +10 utility from worker rights, and -1 utility from the anti-cannabilism bill. Symmetrically, the Eloi get +10 from anti-cannibalism and -1 from worker rights.

If the two bills are considered separately, neither will succeed, because both only get 50% of the vote. (I'm assuming for the sake of argument that a tie is not sufficient to pass a bill.)

If the two bills were bundled together, and the legislators vote myopically (considering only the pros/cons of the bill set before them), then we can achieve the best case scenario: both measures get passed, for +9 to both sides.

However, both the Morlocks and Eloi would prefer to pass their bills without the "pork" of the other bill tacked on. Plausibly, both parties will coordinate to make sure the bills are only ever introduced separately, or vote against the combined bill when it is introduced. Instead, they'll each attempt to bully the other side into lesser concessions. This is especially true if the two parties hate each other; voting in favor of worker rights for Morlocks may be seen as a "betrayal" of the Eloi base, and vice versa.

From this, I draw several lessons:

A. Tit-for-tat in the legislator is not automatically bad. Before thinking about this scenario, I was thinking that deals like "I'll vote for your bill if and only if you vote for mine" were a problem, because they distort the vote (I was thinking that it's best if everyone votes honestly). But if the two bills are voted on one at a time, we want 1 Morlock and 1 Eloi to make a secret deal to vote on each other's bills! Then both measures would pass.

B. Legislation is, importantly, an iterated game rather than a series of single-shot votes. This has pros and cons. On the pro side, tit-for-tat voting strategies can improve overall outcomes. On the con side, tit-for-tat can end up in deadlock where everyone hates everyone else and won't pass each other's bills, due ...
Chaos Induces Abstractions
by johnswentworth — 2021-03-18T20:08:21.739Z

Epistemic status: the first couple sections are intended to be a bog-standard primer on chaos theory. In general, this post mostly sticks close to broadly-accepted ideas; it's intended mainly as background for why one would expect the general ideas of abstraction-as-information-at-a-distance to be true. That said, I’m writing it all from memory, and I am intentionally sweeping some technical details under the rug. If you see a mistake, please leave a comment.

Consider a billiards table:

The particular billiards table we’ll use is one I dug out of the physicists’ supply closet, nestled in between a spherical cow and the edge of an infinite plane. The billiard balls are all frictionless, perfectly spherical, bounce perfectly elastically off of other balls and the edges of the table, etc.

Fun fact about billiard balls: if my aim has a tiny bit of error to it, and I hit a ball at ever-so-slightly the wrong angle, that error will grow exponentially as the balls collide. Picture it like this: we start with an evenly-spaced line of balls on the table.

I try to shoot straight along the line, but the angle is off by a tiny amount, call it Δθ.

The ball rolls forward, and hits the next ball in line. The distance by which it’s off is roughly the ball-spacing length L multiplied by Δθ, i.e. LΔθ.

Since the first ball hits the second ball off-center, the second ball will also have some error in its angle. We do a little geometry, and find that the angular error in the second ball is roughly L2RΔθ, where R is the radius of a ball.

Now the second ball rolls into the third. The math is exactly the same as before, except the initial error is now multiplied by a factor L2R. So when the second ball hits the third, the angular error in the third ball will be multiplied again, yielding error (L2R)2Δθ. Then the next ball will have angular error/uncertainty (L2R)3Δθ. And so forth.

Upshot of all this: in a billiard-ball system, small angular uncertainty grows exponentially with the number of collisions. (In fact, this simplified head-on collision scenario yields the slowest exponential growth; if the balls are hitting at random angles, then the uncertainty grows even faster.)

This is a prototypical example of mathematical chaos: small errors grow exponentially as the system evolves over time. Given even a tiny amount of uncertainty in the...
The EMH is False - Specific Strong Evidence
by sapphire — 2021-03-18T18:38:30.881Z

I am going to defend the following response to "If you are so smart why aren't you rich?": Rationalists actually are smart but we were way too modest and did not bet on our beliefs. The rationalists who actually tried to use rationality to invest often traded extremely lucratively. We should stop being so modest moving forward. Ideas have consequences, including for asset prices.

I will first present the best evidence I have that the EMH is quite false: There are currently high return trades (5% a month at least, possibly more) with extremely low risk (you can lose 1-2% max, probably less depending on execution). These trades take a little execution but do not require professionals. In the recent past, there were VERY simple bets that returned ~10% a month with even less risk. I will describe both these trades then talk about more speculative evidence. Be aware several options are geo-locked (in particular FTX blocks US IP-addresses. No exchange offers futures to traders in the USA).

By the EMH I mean this practical form: People cannot systematically outperform simple strategies like holding VTSAX. Certainly, you cannot expect to have a higher expected value than max(VTSAX, SPY). Opportunities to make money by active investing are either very rare, low volume, or require large amounts of work. Therefore people who are not investing professionally should just buy broad-based index funds.

I would say that for many asset classes you should have a reasonably strong prior that the current price is correct. I would include stocks and normal sports bets. However this prior is weak enough that the standard to overcome it is basically 'convincing argument from a friend'. It is important to approach this with the same mindset you would use to make predictions and to be reasonably detail-oriented. I am not claiming this is trivially easy to beat the market just very doable.

Post Election Trump Betting

You could lucratively bet against Donald Trump long after the election on various platforms. The most lucrative way known to me was to short 'TRUMPFEB' on ftx.com. TRUMPFEB was a token that would pay out 1$ if Trump was president on Feb 1st and 0$ if he was not. The tokens were tradeable. Importantly you could short them to bet against trump. If TRUMPFEB was selling for 8cents and you short TRUMPFEB you would essentially be betting 1 dollar to make 8cents. He...