LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Initial thoughts:

I think the negative effect of additional upvote/downvote options complicate the UI more than it would help. But I often wish I could sort by controversial or sort in a way that ignores downvotes.

🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀😀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐁🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐁🐁🐀🐀🐀🐀

The initial pfizer efficacy study and followups in Israel specifically come to mind.

It seems to me that this habit is universal in American culture, and I'd be surprised (and intrigued!) to hear about any culture where it isn't.

I live in Austria. I would say we do have norms against hypocrisy, but your example with the drivers license seems absurd to me. I would be surprised (and intrigued!) if agreement with this one in particular is actually universal in American culture. In my experience, hypocrisy norms are for moral and crypto-moral topics.

For normies, morality is an imposition. Telling them of new moral requirements increases how much they have to do things that suck to stay a good person. From this perspective, the anti-hypocrisy norm is great. If people don't follow the new requirement they suggest (or can be construed as not doing so), you get to ignore it without further litigation.

Now the classical LW position is that thats wrong, and that you ought to be glad someone informed you how much good you can do by giving away large fractions of your income, because this gave you the opportunity to do so. Because you ought to believe morality in your heart. From this perspective, the anti-hypocrisy norm is useless. It might also be why the drivers license example is a natural fit for you: its all "advice" to you. If you've failed to Chestertons fence, I think its this previous step where it happened.

I think the fact that you can create pseudonymous accounts already functions as a superior anonymizing option without cluttering up the UI, complicating the backend or permitting the attack habryka outlines.

Secondary accounts provide better security because they remove a broader attack vector. If you trust Less Wrong to anonymize you then you are vulnerable to Less Wrong getting hacked. If you manage two separate accounts then a compromise of the Less Wrong servers will not deanonymize you.

Our community tends to respect people who say "I was wrong". I'd rather publicly look stupid for an instant than privately remain stupid forever. If I say an incorrect statement then I can just correct it.

My primary fear is not putting incorrect statements in the public record (which can be corrected). Rather, I fear putting politically unpopular statements in the public record (which cannot be corrected).

Keeping my political opinions private doesn't bother me. Rather the opposite. It would scare me if I didn't have dozens of ideas I was afraid to state publicly. If I didn't have offensive thoughts then I would be a sheep.

However, I don't like being unclear to myself what things I am afraid to say. To fix this I write as if I am comfortable publishing the truth and then I obtrusively redact the most offensive bits like this.

Thanks for the clarifications! I realized that maybe you are mostly interested on the tech sector in the US and AI-related development, which explains also why you didn't think of biomedical research immediately. Is this impression correct? If so, you might want to edit further the question to restrict the range of answers. 

I fixed the link, I didn't notice but it had taken the ) as part of the address.

BTW, I read your post on military tech in the meantime, it was interesting.

The payoff for 2-boxing is dependent on beliefs after 1-boxing because all share prices update every market day and the "payout" for a share is essentially what you can sell it for.

If a sentence is undecidable, then you could have two traders who disagree on its value indefinitely: one would have a highest price to buy, thats below the others lowest price to sell. But then anything between those two prices could be the "market price", in the classical supply and demand sense. If you say that the "payout" of a share is what you can sell it for... well, the "physical causation" trader is also buying shares on the counterfactual option that won't happen. And if he had to sell those, he couldn't sell them at a price close to where he bought them - he could only sell them at how much the "logical causation" trader values them, and so both would be losing "payout" on their trades with the unrealized option. Thats one interpretation of "sell". If theres a "market maker" in addition to both traders, it depends on what prices he makes - and as outlined above, there is a wide range of prices that would be consistent for him to offer as a market maker, including ways which are very close to the logical traders valuations - in which case, the logical trader is gaining on the physical one.

Trying to communicate a vague intuition here: There is a set of methods which rely on there being a time when "everything is done", to then look back from there and do credit assignment for everything that happened before. They characteristically use backwards induction to prove things. I think markets fall into this: the argument for why ideal markets don't have bubbles is that eventually, the real value will be revealed, and so the bubble has to pop, and then someone holds the bag, and you don't want to be that someone, and people predicting this and trying to avoid it will make the bubble pop earlier, in the idealised case instantly. I also think these methods aren't going to work well with embedding. They essentially use "after the world" as a subsitute for "outside the world".

My claim is: eventually, if you observe enough cases of "crossing" in similar circumstances, your expectation for "cross" should be consistent with the empirical history

My question was more "how should this roughly work" rather than "what conditions should it fulfill", because I think thinking about this illuminates my next point.

The hope is that we can block the troll argument completely if proving B->A does not imply cf(A|B)=1

This doesn't help against what I'm imagining, I'm not touching indicative B->A. So, standard Troll Bridge:

• Reasoning within PA (ie, the logic of the agent):
  • Suppose the agent crosses.
    • Further suppose that the agent proves that crossing implies U=-10.
      • Examining the source code of the agent, because we're assuming the agent crosses, either PA proved that crossing implies U=+10, or it proved that crossing implies U=0.
      • So, either way, PA is inconsistent -- by way of 0=-10 or +10=-10.
      • So the troll actually blows up the bridge, and really, U=-10.
    • Therefore (popping out of the second assumption), if the agent proves that crossing implies U=-10, then in fact crossing implies U=-10.
    • By Löb's theorem, crossing really implies U=-10.
    • So (since we're still under the assumption that the agent crosses), U=-10.
  • So (popping out of the assumption that the agent crosses), the agent crossing implies U=-10.
• Since we proved all of this in PA, the agent proves it, and proves no better utility in addition (unless PA is truly inconsistent). On the other hand, it will prove that not crossing gives it a safe U=0. So it will in fact not cross.

But now, say the agents counterfactual reasoning comes not from PA, but from system X. Then the argument fails because "suppose the agent proves crossing->U=-10 in PA" doesn't go any further because examining the sourcecode of the agent doesn't say anything about PA anymore, and "suppose the agent proves crossing->U=-10 in X" doesn't show that PA is inconsistent, so the bridge isn't blown up. But lets have a troll that blows up the bridge if X is inconsistent. Then we can make an argument like this:

• Reasoning within X (ie, the logic of counterfactuals):
  • Suppose the agent crosses.
    • Further suppose that the agent proves in X that crossing implies U=-10.
      • Examining the source code of the agent, because we're assuming the agent crosses, either X proved that crossing implies U=+10, or it proved that crossing implies U=0.
      • So, either way, X is inconsistent -- by way of 0=-10 or +10=-10.
      • So the troll actually blows up the bridge, and really, U=-10.
    • Therefore (popping out of the second assumption), if the agent proves that crossing implies U=-10, then in fact crossing implies U=-10.
    • By Löb's theorem, crossing really implies U=-10.
    • So (since we're still under the assumption that the agent crosses), U=-10.
  • So (popping out of the assumption that the agent crosses), the agent crossing implies U=-10.
• Since we proved all of this in X, the agent proves it, and proves no better utility in addition (unless X is truly inconsistent). On the other hand, it will prove that not crossing gives it a safe U=0. So it will in fact not cross.

Now, this argument relies on X and counterfactual reasoning having a lot of the properties of PA and normal reasoning. But even a system that doesn't run on proofs per se could still end up implementing something a lot like logic, and then it would have a property thats a lot like inconsistency, and then the troll could blow up the bridge conditionally on that. Basically, it still seems reasonable to me that counterfactual worlds should be closed under inference, up to our ability to infer. And I don't see which of the rules for manipulating logical implications wouldn't be valid for counterfactual implications in their own closed system, if you formally separate them. If you want your X to avoid this argument, then it needs to not-do something PA does. "Formal separation" between the systems isn't enough, because the results of counterfactual reasoning still really do effect your actions, and if the counterfactual reasoning system can understand this, Troll Bridge returns. And if there was such a something, we could just use a logic that doesn't do this in the first place, no need for the two-layer approach.

a convincing optimality result could

I'm also sceptical of optimality results. When you're doing subjective probability, any method you come up with will be proven optimal relative to its own prior - the difference between different subjective methods is only in their ontology, and the optimality results don't protect you against mistakes there. Also, when you're doing subjectivism, and it turns out the methods required to reach some optimality condition aren't subjectively optimal, you say "Don't be a stupid frequentist and do the subjectively optimal thing instead". So, your bottom line is written. If the optimality condition does come out in your favour, you can't be more sure because of it - that holds even under the radical version of expected evidence conservation. I also suspect that as subjectivism gets more "radical", there will be fewer optimality results besides the one relative to prior.

Huh, I called this morning and the guy I spoke to said it isn't Pfizer doing the trial. They said I had to call the other (Austrian?) number on the page, or email info@valneva.com. I did the latter.