Open & Welcome Thread - June 2022

Georgists, mandatory parking minimum haters, and housing reform enthusiasts welcome!

Recently I've run across a fascinating economics paper, Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation. The paper's thesis contends that restrictive housing regulations depressed American economic growth by an eye-watering 36% between 1964 and 2009.

That's a shockingly high figure but I found the arguments rather compelling. The paper itself now boasts over 500 citations. I've searched for rebuttals but only stumbled across a post by Bryan Caplan identifying a math error within the paper that led to an understatement(!) of the true economic toll.

This paper should be of great interest to anyone curious about housing regulation and zoning reform, Georgism, perhaps even The Great Stagnation [? · GW] of total factor productivity since the 70s. (Or just anyone who likes the idea of making thousands of extra dollars annually.)

If there's interest, I'd like to write a full-length post diving deeper into this paper and examining its wider implications.

I've got 2 thoughts inspired by What's it like to have sex with Duncan? [LW · GW], which I'm portal-ing over from a comment over there [LW(p) · GW(p)].

1. The personal/frontpage distinction [LW(p) · GW(p)] is basically meaningless unless those pages start looking more different than they do now.
2. Why is the NSFW tag opt out [LW(p) · GW(p)] instead of in? This is not how basically any website works! It's a really really really small thing that could potentially burn me when I send a cool link^[1] to a buddy, they try to find the rest of the series, and end up with a description of someone's sex habits!

To clarify, I really don't care about having these things on LW, and personally support having them here vs elsewhere (though I've not put a lot of thought into this yet). But please let me send posts to kids I know without the sex stuff being visible by default in a way that makes it look totally normal. (To those of you who are going to say "Sex doesn't hurt anyone, let them see it!": sure, maybe sex hurts no one, but it's your job to convince the sexually conservative parents of the bright kid I sent a link to, not to convince me.)

Found an obscure quote by Christiaan Huygens predicting the industrial revolution a century before its inception and predicting the airplane over two hundred years before its invention:

The violent action of the powder is by this discovery restricted to a movement which limits itself as does that of a great weight. And not only can it serve all purposes to which weight is applied, but also in most cases where man or animal power is needed, such as that it could be applied to raise great stones for building, to erect obelisks, to raise water for fountains or to work mills to grind grain .... It can also be used as a very powerful projector of such a nature that it would be possible by this means to construct weapons which would discharge cannon balls, great arrows, and bomb shells .... And, unlike the artillery of today these engines would be easy to transport, because in this discovery lightness is combined with power.

This last characteristic is very important, and by this means permits the discovery of new kinds of vehicles on land and water.

And although it may sound contradictory, it seems not impossible to devise some vehicle to move through the air ....

While ultimately land, water, and air vehicles wouldn't be powered by Huygens's gunpowder engine, it remains a remarkably prescient forecast. It should also give AI researchers and other futurists some hope in their ability to predict the next technological revolution.

Hi folks, I've started an organization called "LessDeath" (http://www.lessdeath.org) with the purpose of supporting the longevity technology field's growth and effectiveness. The name is an obvious reference to LessWrong so I thought I should introduce myself and explain why I chose that.

From your FAQ, "LessWrong is a place to 1) develop and train rationality, and 2) apply one’s rationality to real-world problems." LessDeath will be training people on the specific domain of aging biology and longevity technology, and then helping connect them with real world projects to contribute to.

I also see LessDeath as similar to the Effective Altruist organization 80000hours, but again for longevity specifically rather than a broader mandate. An EA has an obvious lineage connection to Rationalism.

Lastly, I'm a big fan of HPMOR...

I'd appreciate feedback and involvement from folks in the Rationalist community. Also, LessDeath is having its first event this summer and perhaps some of you would like to apply to attend - check out the website if so!

Thanks for your time,
Mark Hamalainen

I think we have an elephant in the room. As I outlined in a recent post [LW · GW], networks of agents may do Hebbian learning as inevitably as two and two makes four. If this is the case, there are some implications.

If a significant fraction of human optimization power comes from Hebbian learning in social networks, then the optimal organizational structure is one that permits such learning. Institutional arrangements with rigid formal structure are doomed to incompetence.

If the learning-network nature of civilization is a major contributor to human progress, we may need to revise our models of human intelligence and strategies for getting the most out of it.

Given the existence of previously understudied large-scale learning networks, it's possible that there already exist agentic entities of unknown capability and alignment status. This may have implications for the tactical context of alignment research and priorities for research direction.

If agents naturally form learning networks, the creation and proliferation of AIs whose capabilities don't seem dangerous in isolation may have disproportionate higher-order effects due to the creation of novel large-scale networks or modification of existing ones.

It seems to me that the above may constitute reason to raise an alarm at least locally. Does it? If so, what steps should be taken?

Where do I go for help/review with front-page-worthy drafts, especially drafts that I have high confidence will earn/deserve/warrant more than 50 upvotes and significant aid for lots of lesswrong users?

I am writing a post about how anthropics means that general intelligence could have had a 1/1,000,000,000,000 chance of ever evolving anywhere on earth, and given that we're intelligent enough to observe human evolution, we'd still see human intelligence, and even failed offshoots like chimpanzees and simple insect brains. But the possibility of that scenario would also imply a >1% chance that AGI timelines are weighted during or after 2060, and is strong evidence against the 99% of AGI within the decade (more like 90%), because we might have always lived in a scenario where general intelligence was always astronomically difficult to emerge via brute forcing. Therefore, there is no log odds of survival, because there is more than a 1% chance that we have more than 40 years to figure it out.

Anyone know what's up with the betting markets? They give Trump 40% to win the presidency but only 33% to win the primary, and I also don't get the jumps in his graph.

What's the term for statistical problems that are like exploration-exploitation, but without the exploitation? I tried searching for 'exploration' but that wasn't it.

In particular, suppose I have a bunch of machines which each succeed or fail independently with a probability that is fixed separately for each machine. And suppose I can pick machines to sample to see if they succeed or fail. How do I sample them if I want to become 99% certain that I've found the best machine, while using the fewest number of samples?

The difference with exploration-exploitation is that this is just a trial period, and I don't care about how many successes I get during this testing. So I want something like Thompson sampling, but for my purposes Thompson sampling oversamples the machine it currently thinks is best because it values getting successes rather than ruling out the second-best options.

Any idea what's going on with the judging of the AI Safety Arguments Competition [? · GW]? It's been more than a week now since it closed, and I haven't heard anything about it or the follow-up contest.

If there's any need for help with the judging, I could help (especially if there's ways to work around the issue that I was the most active participant so I have an absurdly massive conflict of interest). Like, I could judge other people's entries, but only in a positive way that makes them more competitive, such as giving ignored entries a second look.

If AI alignment were downstream of civilization alignment, how could we tell? How would the world look different if it were/were not?

If AI alignment is downstream of civilization alignment, how would we pivot? I'd expect at least some generalizability between AI and non-AI alignment work and it would certainly be easier to learn from experience.