Senior Research Scientist at NTT Research, Physics & Informatics Lab. jessriedel.com , jessriedel[at]gmail[dot]com
JessRiedel
Karma: 599
The automated tools on Zotero are good enough now that getting the complete bibtex information doesn’t really make it much easier. I can convert a DOI or arXiv number into a complete listing with one click, and I can do the same with a paper title in 2-3 clicks. The laborious part is (1) interacting with each author and (2) classifying/categorizing the paper.
Looks fine, thanks.
Does the org have an official stance? I’ve seen people write it both ways. Happy to defer to you on this, so I’ve edited.
If we decide to expand the database in 2021 to attempt comprehensive coverage of blog posts, then a machine-readable citation system would be extremely helpful. However, to do that we would need to decide on some method for sorting/filtering the posts, which is going to depend on what the community finds most interesting. E.g., do we want to compare blog posts to journal articles, or should the analyses remain mostly separate? Are we going to crowd-source the filtering by category and organization, or use some sort of automated guessing based on authorship tags on the post? How expansive should the database be regarding topic?
Currently of the 358 web items in our database, almost half (161) are blog posts from AI Alignment Forum (106), LessWrong (38), or Effective Altruism Forum (17). (I emphasize that, as mentioned in the post, our inclusion procedure for web content was pretty random.) Since these don’t collect citations on GoogleScholar, some sort of data on them (# comments and upvotes) would be very useful to surface the most notable posts.
TAI Safety Bibliographic Database
Somewhat contra Alex’s example of a tree, I am struck by the comprehensibility of biological organisms. If, before I knew any biology, you had told me only that (1) animals are mechanistic, (2) are in fact composed of trillions of microscopic machines, and (3) were the result of a search process like evolution, then the first time I looked at the inside of an animal I think I would have expected absolutely *nothing* that could be macroscopically understood. I would have expected a crazy mesh of magic material that operated at a level way outside my ability to understand without (impossibly) constructing a mental entire from the bottom up. And indeed, if animals had been designed through a one-shot unstructured search I think this is what they would be like.
In reality, of course, animals have macroscopic parts that can be partially understood. There’s a tube food passes through, with multiple food-processing organs attached. There are bones for structure, muscles to pull, and tendons to transmit that force. And the main computation for directing the animal on large scales takes place in a central location (the brain).
We can tell and understand a post-hoc story about why the animal works, as a machine, and it’s sorta right. That animals have a strong amount of design, making this is possible, seems to be related to the iterated search-and-evaluate process that evolution used; it was not one-shot unstructured search.
At the least, this suggest that if search vs. design identifies a good dichotomy or a good axis, it is an axis/dichotomy that is fundamental, and arises way before human-level intelligence.
Agreed. The optimal amount of leverage is of course going to be very dependent on one’s model and assumptions, but the fact that a young investor with 100% equities does better *on the margin* by adding a bit of leverage is very robust.
I endorse ESRogs’ replies. I’ll just add some minor points.
1. Nothing in this book or the lifecycle strategy rests on anything specific to the US stock market. As I said in my review
The fact that, when young, you are buying stocks on margin makes it tempting to interpret this strategy is only good when one is not very risk averse or when the stock market has a good century. But for any time-homogeneous view you have on what stocks will do in the future, there is a version of this strategy that is better than a conventional strategy. (A large fraction of casual critics seem to miss this point.)
If you are bearish on stocks as a whole, this is incorporated by you choosing a lower equity premium and hence lower overall stock allocation. This choice is independent of the central theoretical idea of the book.
2. Yours is a criticism of all modeling and is not specific to the lifecycle strategy.
3. As ESRogs mentioned, neither this book nor my review has the timing you suggest, so the psychoanalysis of proponents of this strategy appears inconsistent.
4. I acknowledged this sort of argument in my review, and indeed argued that the best approaches hinges on such correlations. But consider: even in the extreme case where I believes my future income is highly correlated with the stock market and is just as volatile, the lifecycle strategy recommends that my equity exposure should start low when I’m young and then increase with age, in opposition to conventional strategies! So even if you take a different set of starting assumptions from the authors, you still get a deep insight from their basic framework.
Review of “Lifecycle Investing”
The problem is that there are other RNA viruses besides SARS-CoV-2, such as influenza, and depending when in the disease course the samples were taken, the amount of irrelevant RNA might exceed the amount of SARS-CoV-2 RNA by orders of magnitude
There is going to be tons of RNA in saliva from sources besides SARS-CoV-2 always. Bits of RNA are floating around everywhere. Yes, there is some minimum threshold of SARS-CoV-2 density at which the test will fail to detect it, but this should just scale up by a factor of N when pooling over N people. I don’t see why other RNA those people have will be a problem any more than the other sources of RNA in a single person are a problem for a non-pooled test.
“The government” in the US certainly doesn’t have the authority to do most of these things.
Both the federal and state governments have vast powers during public health emergencies. For instance, the Supreme Court has made clear that the government can hold you down and vaccinate you against your will. Likewise, the Army (not just National Guard) can be deployed to enforce laws, including curfew and other quarantine laws.
Yes, it’s unclear whether government officials would be willing to use these options, and how much the public would resist them, but the formal authority is definitely there.
Hi Rohin, are older version of the newsletter available?
Also:
This sounds mostly like a claim that it is more computationally expensive to deal with hidden information and long term planning.
One consideration: When you are exploring a tree of possibilities, every bit of missing information means you need to double the size of the tree. So it could be that hidden information leads to an exponential explosion in search cost in the absence of hidden-information-specific search strategies. Although strictly speaking this is just a case of something being “more computationally expensive”, exponential penalties generically push things from being feasible to infeasible.
What is the core problem of your autonomous driving group?!
Welcome to SSC-LW Toronto [Edit With Your Details]
Marshall, I would keep in mind that good intentions are not sufficient for getting your comments up-voted. They need to contribute to the discussion. Since your account was deleted, we can’t to judge one way or the other.
I think there is some truth to Marshall’s critique and that the situation could be easily improved by making it clear (either on the “about” page or in some other high-visibility note) what the guidelines for voting are. That means guidelines would have to be agreed upon. Until that happens, I suspect people will continue to just vote up comments they agree with, stifling debate.
I’ve previously suggested a change to the voting system, but this might require more man-power to implement than is available.
It seems like the only criterion for the rating of comment/post be the degree to which it contributes to healthy discussion (well-explained, on-topic, not completely stupid). However, there is an strong tendency for people to vote comments based on whether they disagree with them or not, which is very bad for healthy discussion. It discourages new ideas and drives away visitors with differing opinions when they see a page full of highly rated comments for a particular viewpoint (cf. reddit).
The feature I would recommend most for this website is a dual voting feature: one vote up/down for the quality of the post/comment, and one for whether you agree or disagree with it. This would allow quality, disagreeable comments to float to the top while allowing everyone to satisfy their urge to express their opinion. It also would force people to make a cognitive distinction between the two categories.
Even people like me who try to base their ratings independent of their agreement with the comment are biased in their assessment of the quality. It would be very healthy to read a comment you agree with and would normally upvote (because your quality standards have been biased downward) only to see that a large fraction of the community finds the argument poor.
Incidentally, you might allow voting for humor or on-topic-ness so that people can (say) still be funny every once in a while without directly contributing to the current discussion per se.
(Sorry that was so long. It was something I had been thinking about for awhile.)
I’m confused. What is the relationship between Alcor and the Cryonics Institute? Is it either-or? What is the purpose of yearly fees to them if you can just take out insurance which will cover all the costs in the event of your death?
Eliezer, I believe that your belittling tone is conducive to neither a healthy debate nor a readable blog post. I suspect that your attitude is borne out of just frustration, not contempt, but I would still strongly encourage you to write more civilly. It’s not just a matter of being nice; rudeness prevents both the speaker and the listener from thinking clearly and objectively, and it doesn’t contribute to anything.
> Of course, the outcomes we’re interested in are hospitalization, severe Covid, and death. I’d expect the false positives on these to be lower than for having Covid at all, but across tens of thousands of people (the Israel study did still have thousands even in later periods), it’s not crazy that some people would be very ill with pneumonia and also get a false positive on Covid.
Does this observation undermine the claim of a general trend in effectiveness with increasing severity of disease? That is, if false positives bias the measured effectiveness downward, and if false positives are more frequent with less severe severe, then the upward trend is less robust and our use of it to extrapolate into places where the error bars are naively large is less convincing.