All of waveBidder's Comments + Replies

I'm somewhat flabbergasted that no one has mentioned radicalxChange or quadratic funding. They're a solution that doesn't force the producer to take on all the risks of failure, at the cost of needing a centralized pot of money.

2Yoav Ravid
The cost of needing a centralized pot of money is a big cost, and the requirement to have several projects at once, make it a solution to a very different class of problems. That's probably the reason it wasn't mentioned, but still, thanks for mentioning it because I didn't know about it. Upvoted. It would be interesting, though, to try to combine the two ideas. You can add an option to the platform described in the post to pledge money to a centralized pool that's used to match pledges people make (and if they're refunded than the refund bonus on your matching pledge goes either to the pool or back to you). That way can you support the production of highly desired goods without having to actually choose by yourself which goods. 

In a Bayesian context, seeking evidence is about narrowing the probability distribution from what should be a relatively flat prior. One could probably make a case for not making a decision until the cost of putting it off outweighs the gain by decreasing the uncertainty.

3TAG
"Narrowing" can be passive or active. Passive narrowing is going to be a lot less efficient than active narrowing. If you are in a position to wait for as long as it takes , that would not be a problem...but you aren't't. You also don't have a pre existing mental database of every possible hypothesis, or the ability to assign infinitesimal probabilities to them.

John Ioannidis, of all people, who should know better.

You're missing the very real possibility of long-term negative side-effects from the vaccine, such as triggering an auto-immune disease or actually increasing your susceptibility, both mentioned in the whitepaper (whose risk-assessment I would be pretty sceptical of). I would think of this as more a trade-off between risks of side effects and COVID risks, rather than whether or not you can afford it.

5Dentin
Yes.  The differential tradeoff is how one should evaluate this.  The only reason my evaluation came out in favor of trying the radvac vaccine is because I have a high-risk event coming up in the next few months, and I am extremely unlikely to be able to acquire a commercial vaccine before then.

Surprised no one has brought up the Fourier domain representation/characteristic functions. Over there, convolution is just repeated multiplication, so what this gives is . Conveniently, gaussians stay gaussians, and the fact that we have probability distributions fixes . So what we're looking for is how quickly the product above squishes to a gaussian around , which looks to be in large part determined by the tail behavior of . I suspect what is driving your result of needing few convolutions is the fact that yo... (read more)

2chasmani
I was thinking something similar. I vaguely remember that the characteristic function proof includes an assumption of n being large, where n is the number of variables being summed. I think that allows you to ignore some higher order n terms. So by keeping those in you could probably get some way to quantify how "close" a resulting distribution is to Gaussian. And you could relate that back to moments quite naturally as well. 

There's generally a simpler explanation in this case that Trump and the Joint chiefs of staff have had a rocky relationship, so the military has no interest in assisting a coup attempt, even if they are willing to renounce democratic norms (they are sworn to protect the constitution, after all). Without cooperation from the military a coup is a non-starter.

What needs to be assumed when reasoning about existential risk, and how are the high stakes responsible for forcing us to assume it?

I guess I opted for too much brevity. By their very nature, we don't* have any examples of existential threats actually happening, so we have to rely very heavily on counterfactuals, which aren't the most reliable kind of reasoning. How can we reason about what conditions lead up to a nuclear war, for example? We have no data about what led up to one in the past, so we have to rely on abstractions like game theory a... (read more)

1Sunny from QAD
Ah, I see what you're saying now. So it is analogous to the cancer example: higher stakes make less-likely-to-succeed-efforts more worth doing. (When compared with lower stakes, not when compared with efforts more likely to succeed, of course.) That makes sense.

Writing well is really hard. Thanks for sharing.

Answer by waveBidder40

I believe the term you are looking for is a fox, in the sense of Tetlock. But honestly, as someone who is generally pro-toolboxism, I don't understand why that's offensive. The whole point is that you have a whole toolbox of different approaches

1Tim Liptrot
Fox - that sounds like a good word. Can you link me the Tetlock book it comes from. Yeah I agree that toolbox isn’t shouldn’t be offensive. I guess something in my tone offended the person, rather than the word itself.

Often the issue is that what you're trying to predict is sufficiently important that you need to assume *something*, even if the tools you have available are insufficient. Existential risks generally fall in this category. Replacing the news with an upcoming cancer diagnosis, and telepathy with paying very careful attention to that organ, and whether Sylvanus is being an idiot is much less clear.


On the other hand, if someone is taking even odds on an extremely specific series of events, yeah, they're kind of dumb. And I wouldn't be surprised to find pundits doing this.

2Sunny from QAD
As a side note, I wonder if I should have had him bet on a less specific series of events. The way the story is currently makes it almost sound like I'm just rehashing the "burdensome details" sequence, but what I was really trying to call out was the fairly specific fallacy of "X is all the information I have access too, therefore X is enough information to make the decision". Overall I wish I had put more thought into this story. I did let it simmer in mind for a few days after writing it but before posting it, but the decision to finally publish was kind of impulsive, and I didn't try very hard to determine if it was comprehensible before doing so. Oops! I've updated towards "I need to do more work to make my writing clear".
1Sunny from QAD
In the cancer diagnosis example, part of the reason that I would think it's less clear that Sylvanus is being an idiot is that you really might be able to get some evidence about the presence of cancer by paying close attention to the affected organ. I  think I see where you're coming from, though. The importance of a cancer diagnosis (compared to a news addiction) does mean that trying out various apparently dumb ways of getting at the truth becomes a lot more sane. But I don't think I understand what you're saying in the first sentence. What needs to be assumed when reasoning about existential risk, and how are the high stakes responsible for forcing us to assume it? (For context, my knowledge about the various existential risks humanity might face is pretty shallow, but I'm on board with the idea that they can exist and are important to think about and act upon.)

not at all, and especially not for subjects with intro textbooks. That said, it's just a starting place, and it's almost worth as much as a source of references as an actual overview.

1Nyarlathotep
Gotcha, thanks :)
There is a power imbalance in place.

this is precisely the argument that cancel culture often makes, often with good reason, with outside actors piling on what may have started as a parochial dispute.

So for something interactive which helps build intuition, this is a great game about the prisoner's dilemma (goes in the same direction as what greylag linked actually, but with much cuter animations, and can serve as intro). If you want something with more substance, I don't think I can beat a thorough reading of the wikipedia page followed by choosing a book from their further reading section which matches what you're comfortable with.

1Nyarlathotep
This game looks really interesting. Thank you! I often hear people say that wikipedia is not a reliable source of information. In your opinion, is the true?

I'm vaguely pointing at the role of game theory and the resulting mechanism design in shaping what actions are viable. The tragedy of the commons is a classic example where some mechanism is needed to prevent a common loss. It can be easy to portray people in such a situation as greedy, but the mechanism works for altruistic people too. Escape without oversight requires everyone to be selfless, which is a totally unreasonable bar.

1Nyarlathotep
Game theory is something that I see mentioned quite often, but I am totally unfamiliar with it. Do you have any suggested books, papers, or videos you believe may give me a entry-level understanding of the subject?
Answer by waveBidder10

Often the problem isn't inherent goodness or badness, but the incentive structure that an environment creates, and whether people's natural tendencies to want to be high status results in benefit for everyone or not. In an environment with no one who has the exclusive right to the use of force, violence becomes a means of acquiring resources and status. If you set up the rules correctly (and people view you as a legitimate source of laws), people are incentivized to work towards the common good.

1Nyarlathotep
This is a quote from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan that I find closely parallels what you're talking about. This last bit though... ...is something I have yet to come across in any of my readings but I really like it. I feel like most descriptions of social contract theory just say that people are bad, therefore they need a government to keep them in line. I find this idea that people would give up some of their natural rights not just for their own personal benefit, but for the common good, is a really reassuring one.

While this is a nice summary of classifier trade-offs, I think you are entirely too dismissive of the role of history in the dataset, and if I didn't know any better, I would walk away with the idea that fairness comes down to just choosing an optimal trade-off for a classifier. If you had read any of the technical response, you would have noticed that when controlling for "recidivism, criminal history, age and gender across races, black defendants were 45 percent more likely to get a higher score". Controls are important because they let y... (read more)

This is fun. You might consider looking into dynamical systems, since this is in effect what you are studying here. The general idea for a dynamical system is that you have some state whose derivative is given by some function . You can look at the fixed points of such systems, and characterize their behavior relative to these. The notion of bifurcation classifies what happens as you change the parameters in a similar way to what you're doing
There are maybe 2 weird things you're doing from this perspective. The first is... (read more)

Why doesn't district 9 count? I get that South Africa is a very different place than the rest of the sub-continent, but that would be like saying a movie about Mexico doesn't count as North American.

Your description reminds me somewhat of Slaughterhouse 9, with its focus on how war would be perceived from an alien perspective, though I guess the moral clarity that that book gets from being written after a war with clear victors is not available to us w.r.g. to the state of the middle east. I second thetruejacob that it is difficult to find any reference to the work; does it exist in English somewhere? It does sound worthwhile

My take away is that we should actually only be counting EPM in these matches, rather than APM, and counting most/all of AlphaStar's clicks as effective.