LESSWRONG
LW

Orborde — LessWrong

Learning quantum mechanics involves two things:

learning the fundamentals, the nature of the stuff of which Nature is made; and
loads of universe-imposed incidental complexity, spinors and vector calculus and Lie algebras and Hilbert spaces, in order to be able to effectively apply the fundamentals to the real world.

Now, me, personally, I really like the feeling of understanding how stuff fundamentally works, even if I'm missing the accumulated genius-lifetimes' worth of tricks-I-could-theoretically-work-out-from-first-principles that I'd need in order to make that fundamental understanding practically useful. I loved Introduction to abstract entropy and Generalized Heat Engine.

This post is an attempt to treat quantum mechanics in a similar way: exploring it with mathematical precision in an aggressively-stripped-down... (read 2842 more words →)

What is the best day to celebrate Smallpox Eradication Day?

Orborde

Several of my friends posted on Facebook/threw parties this weekend for a date of May 8. However, searching on Facebook, I find that I and several other friends have been posting celebratory messages on Facebook on December 9 in previous years.

This inconsistency is probably because there are two obvious candidate dates for eradication:

The global eradication of smallpox was certified, based on intense verification activities, by a commission of eminent scientists on 9 December 1979 and subsequently endorsed by the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980.

"500 Million, But Not a Single One More", which is widely shared and has been adapted at least once for reading at a large Secular Solstice, uses the December 9 date.

I think creating more consensus on which date is the "official" one for celebration purposes would be a small improvement (at the very least: I would stop confusing my relatives by year-to-year inconsistency on when I message them a little commemoration). So, which is it?

AI Forecasting Meetup

Optimization Process

Optimization Process, Orborde

Making claims about AI is in fashion these days, and putting numbers on your claims is always in fashion! Come do both!

Here's a doc full of ideas of things to predict; you are welcome to contribute to it, and by no means limited to it.
If we can get enough people to agree on operationalizations of important questions, I plan to throw up some Manifold markets, and also fund a tournament with some three-digit number of real dollars.
Location is Rhein Haus Seattle, a bar with an outdoor seating area.

What's going on with this failure of Bayes to converge?

Orborde

There are circumstances (which might only occur with infinitesimal probability, which would be a relief) under which a perfect Bayesian reasoner with an accurate model and reasonable priors – that is to say, somebody doing everything right – will become more and more convinced of a very wrong conclusion, approaching certainty as they gather more data.

(click through the notes on that post to see some previous discussion)

I have two major questions:

1. Is this exposition correctly capturing Freedman's counterexample?

2. If using a uniform prior sometimes breaks, what prior should I be using, and, more importantly, how do I arrive at that prior?

Taxi Industry Regulation, Deregulation, and Reregulation: The Paradox of Market Failure

Orborde

(from the March 2018 Gwern.net newsletter)

Uber/Lyft are disrupting the near-total regulatory capture of the taxi industry. But why does that regulatory mess exist in the first place? As it turns out, the regulations are trying to solve a bunch of specific market failures in the legacy taxi industry, and this paper thoroughly explains what those failures are.

Pricing externalities is not necessarily economically efficient

Orborde

[A]s long as externalities exist and are not internalized via Pigouvian taxes, the result is inefficient. The inefficiency is eliminated by charging the polluter an emission fee equal to the damage done by his pollution. In some real world cases it may be difficult to measure the amount of the damage, but, provided that that problem can be solved, using Pigouvian taxes to internalize externalities produces the efficient outcome.

That analysis was accepted by virtually the entire economics profession prior to Coase's work in the field. It is wrong—not in one way but in three. The existence of externalities does not necessarily lead to an inefficient result. Pigouvian taxes, even if they can be correctly calculated, do not in general lead to the efficient result. Third, and most important, the problem is not really externalities at all—it is transaction costs.

Meetup Notes: Ole Peters on ergodicity

Orborde

Ole Peters claims that the standard expected utility toolbox for evaluating wagers is a flawed basis for rational decisionmaking. In particular, it commonly fails to take into account that an investor/bettor taking a series of repeated bets is not an ergodic process.

Optimization Process, internety, myself, and a couple others spent about 5 hours across a couple of Seattle meetups investigating what Peters was saying.

Background

Why do we care?

Proximally, because Nassim Taleb is bananas about ergodicity.

More interestingly, expected utility maximization is widely accepted as the basis for rational decisionmaking. Finding flaws (or at least pathologies) in this foundation is therefore quite high leverage.

A specific example: many people's retirement investment strategies might be said to... (read 1096 more words →)

Who captures economic gains from life extension treatments?

Orborde

Assuming that there are economic gains to be had at all, which participants in economies are best positioned to capture those gains?

Important because this determines the best business plans for life extension companies to pursue.

Do they sell to corporations? individuals? governments?
What are plausible deals they could cut? e.g. would a corporate buyer want to offer life extension to its employees conditional on those employees remaining childfree?

What economic gains are there in life extension treatments?

Orborde

To put it another way: does stopping or slowing aging save resources for society as a whole, compared to raising new humans to replace old ones?

Plausible economic gains from life extension:

Raising a human from birth to age 17 in the United States costs about $234K.
Retired people largely live off their savings; their economic activity is almost entirely consumption. Life extension would presumably allow people to stay productively employed in the workforce longer.

Plausible economic losses:

Death of society's "old guard" may be serving a useful purpose by destroying calcified institutions and ideas, allowing better ones to bloom.

This question is important because, if it turns out that raising new humans to replace old ones is at least as resource-efficient as anti-aging treatments, then inter-society competition will not particularly favor anti-aging investment.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Orborde

[Link] Sarah Constantin on RaDVaC

Meetup Notes: Ole Peters on ergodicity

Quantum without complication

Pricing externalities is not necessarily economically efficient

Orborde

Orborde

Quantum without complication

What is the best day to celebrate Smallpox Eradication Day?

[Link] Sarah Constantin on RaDVaC

What's going on with this failure of Bayes to converge?

Taxi Industry Regulation, Deregulation, and Reregulation: The Paradox of Market Failure

Pricing externalities is not necessarily economically efficient

Meetup Notes: Ole Peters on ergodicity

Orborde

[Link] Sarah Constantin on RaDVaC

Meetup Notes: Ole Peters on ergodicity

Quantum without complication

Pricing externalities is not necessarily economically efficient

Orborde

Orborde

Quantum without complication

What is the best day to celebrate Smallpox Eradication Day?

[Link] Sarah Constantin on RaDVaC

What's going on with this failure of Bayes to converge?

Taxi Industry Regulation, Deregulation, and Reregulation: The Paradox of Market Failure

Pricing externalities is not necessarily economically efficient

Meetup Notes: Ole Peters on ergodicity

Background

Why do we care?