Nathan Young's Shortform

I am trying to learn some information theory.

It feels like the bits of information between 50% and 25% and 50% and 75% should be the same.

But for probability p, the information is -log2(p).

But then the information of .5 -> .25 is 1 bit and but from .5 to .75 is .41 bits. What am I getting wrong?

I would appreciate blogs and youtube videos.

I think I'm gonna start posting top blogpost to the main feed (mainly from dead writers or people I predict won't care) 

If you or a partner have ever been pregnant and done research on what is helpful and harmful, feel free to link it here and I will add it to the LessWrong pregnancy wiki page. 

https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/pregnancy [? · GW] 

Epistemic status: written quickly, probably errors

Some thoughts on Manifund

• To me it seems like it will be the GiveDirectly of regranting (perhaps along with NonLinear) rather than the GiveWell
• It will be capable of rapidly scaling (especially if some regrantors are able to be paid for their time if they are dishing out a lot). It's not clear to me that's a bottleneck of granting orgs.
• There are benefits to centralised/closed systems. Just as GiveWell makes choices for people and so delivers 10x returns, I expect that Manifund will do worse, on average than OpenPhil, which has centralised systems, centralised theories of impact.
• Not everyone wants their grant to be public. If you have a sensitive idea (easy to imagine in AI) you may not want to publicly announce you're trying to get funding
• As with GiveDirectly, there is a real benefit of ~dignity/~agency. And I guess I think this is mostly vibes, but vibes matter. I can imagine crypto donors in particular finding a transparent system with individual portfolios much more attractive than OpenPhil. I can imagine that making a big difference on net.
• Notable that the donors aren't public. And I'm not being snide, I just mean it's interesting to me given the transparency of everything else.
• I love mechanism design. I love prizes, I love prediction markets. So I want this to work, but the base rate for clever mechanisms outcompeting bureaucratic ones seems low. But perhaps this finds a way to deliver and then outcompetes at scale (which seems my theory for if GiveDirectly ends up outcompeting GiveWell)

Am I wrong? 

Nathan and Carson's Manifold discussion.

As of the last edit my position is something like:

"Manifold could have handled this better, so as not to force everyone with large amounts of mana to have to do something urgently, when many were busy. 

Beyond that they are attempting to satisfy two classes of people:

• People who played to donate can donate the full value of their investments
• People who played for fun now get the chance to turn their mana into money

To this end, and modulo the above hassle this decision is good. 

It is unclear to me whether there was an implicit promise that mana was worth 100 to the dollar. Manifold has made some small attempt to stick to this, but many untried avenues are available, as is acknowledging they will rectify the error if possible later. To the extent that there was a promise (uncertain) and no further attempt is made, I don't really believe they really take that promise seriously.

It is unclear to me what I should take from this, though they have not acted as I would have expected them to. Who is wrong? Me, them, both of us? I am unsure."

Threaded discussion

I recall a comment on the EA forum about Bostrom donating a lot to global dev work in the early days. I've looked for it for 10 minutes. Does anyone recall it or know where donations like this might be recorded?

No petrov day? I am sad.

Why you should be writing on the LessWrong wiki.

There is way too much to read here, but if we all took pieces and summarised them in their respective tag, then we'd have a much denser resources that would be easier to understand.

I did a quick community poll - Community norms poll (2 mins) [LW · GW] 

I think it went pretty well. What do you think next steps could/should be? 

Here are some points with a lot of agreement.

Things I would do dialogues about:

(Note I may change my mind during these discussions but if I do so I will say I have)

• Prediction is the right frame for most things
• Focus on world states not individual predictions
• Betting on wars is underrated
• The UK House of Lords is okay actually
• Immigration should be higher but in a way that doesn't annoy everyone and cause backlash

I appreciate reading women talk about what is good sex for them. But it's a pretty thin genre, especially with any kind of research behind it.

So I'd recommend this (though it is paywalled): 

https://aella.substack.com/p/how-to-be-good-at-sex-starve-her?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

Also I subscribed to this for a while and it was useful:

https://start.omgyes.com/join

I suggest that rats should use https://manifold.love/ as the Schelling dating app. It has long profiles and you can bet on other people getting on.

What more could you want!

I am somewhat biased because I've bet that it will be a moderate success.

Relative Value Widget

It gives you sets of donations and you have to choose which you prefer. If you want you can add more at the bottom.

https://allourideas.org/manifund-relative-value 

Other things I would like to be able to express anonymously on individual comments:

• This is poorly framed - Sometimes i neither want to agree nor diagree. I think the comment is orthogonal to reality and agreement and disagreement both push away from truth.
• I don't know - If a comment is getting a lot of agreement/disagreement it would also be interesting to see if there could be a lot of uncertainty

It's a shame the wiki doesn't support the draft google-docs-like editor. I wish I could make in-line comments while writing.