Rudi C's Shortform

Reading AI alignment posts on here has made me realize how a lot of these ideas can potentially also apply to societal structures. Our social institutions are kind of like an AI system that uses humans for its computing units. Unfortunately, our institutions are not that “friendly”. In fact, badly aligned institutions are probably a major cause of unprogress in the developing world. Has there been much thought/discussion on these topics? Is there potential for adapting AI safety research to social mechanism design?

Can we agree on a tag for posts that show some product that might be of interest to LWers? (Similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

Example posts:

• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kjQXzkTGuixoJtQnq/we-ve-built-connected-papers-a-visual-tool-for-researchers [LW · GW]
• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/v9s6NXyJc372ZowcR/rationalfiction-io-publish-discover-and-discuss-rational [LW · GW]

When the Coronavirus started in the winter, I spend quite a bit of time reading related info, mostly from the LW diaspora but some from elsewhere. After some time passed, I noticed that this seems to be low value and procrastinatory, so I have not read much more about the topic. Recently, my sibling (who has had contact with a known Coronavirus infected person) has been showing some cold symptoms, and I am wondering if there are any summary posts of the practical stuff?

I took a look at the practical advice thread, but I had already read the top posts before, and the thread is also quite old and scattered. Recent Coronavirus posts seem to be only from Zvi, who focuses more on epidemiological statistics, and not practical advice, as far as I have read. Hasn’t there been new actionable info in the recent months?

Another Vitamin D Covid study:

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/advance-article/doi/10.1210/clinem/dgaa733/5934827

These caterpillars go dormant when frozen in the arctic, and come alive again.

Just read Bostrom’s Pascal’s Mugging; Can’t the problem be solved as follows?

I have a probability estimate E0 in my head for the mugger giving me X (X being a lot) utility if I give them my money. E0 is not a number, as my brain does not seem to work with our traditional floating point numbers. What data structure actually represents E0, is not clear to me, but I can say E0 is a feeling of “empirically next to impossible, game-theoretically inadvisable to act on it being true”. Now, what’s the probability of I getting X utility tomorrow without giving the mugger my money? Let’s call that E1. E1 is “empirically next to impossible.” So giving my money to the mugger does NOT increase my expected utility gain at all! In fact, it decreases it, as I process E0 as a lower probability than E1 (because E0 is game-theoretically negative while E1 is neutral).

Now, you might say this is not solving the problem but bypassing it. I don’t feel this is true. Anyone who has studied numerical computation knows that errors are important and we can never have precise numbers.

Are there any good introductory textbooks on decision theory? I searched some months ago, but only found a nontechnical philosophical book ...

Do you know of a free solution (not necessarily Free Software, though that’s preferred) I can use to turn speech to text? (Also no cloud solutions. I do not have the credit card and Western phone number they require.)