This whole time? Man, I haven’t been looking hard enough. What’s the algorithm, 2d Saturdays at 1900?
goose000
Karma: 80
Ahh, I think I did not think through what “rationality enhancement” might mean; perhaps my own recent search and the AI context of Yudkowsky’s original intent skewed me a little. I was thinking of something like “understanding and applying concepts of rationality” in a way that might include “anticipating misaligned AI” or “anticipating AI-human feedback responses”.
I like the way you’ve framed what’s probably the useful question. I’ll need to think about that a bit more.
Looking through the comments, it seems like most of my thoughts have been captured (economy of scale, collaboration producing non-linear accumulation, etc) But some of the others (risk management, the time axis of logistics) helped me come up with a new one: perishability. When we combine some of the other factors (especially risk) people will at times have a perishable surplus. At these times they would seek to convert this surplus to something non-perishable or some other thing that they need at the time. If we had a society as described above plus uniform starting conditions and everyone used the same dice-rolls (i.e. everyone had the same good/bad corn year), I believe this reason for trade would cease to exist
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Cool, that sounds like a pretty useful combination.
I’d love to. The soonest I’d be available in August would be at the end of the month. I’m sure we can find somewhere public that would work. What will you be studying?
Wait, isn’t that an example of efficiency of scale being dependent on investment? You have to get a 1-foot rope and scissors, but once you have, you can create two 1⁄2 foot ropes? I think the “given a 1-foot rope” is doing more work than you realize, because when I try to apply your example to the world above, I keep getting hung up on “but in the imaginary world above, when we account for economy of scale, if you just needed one 1⁄2 foot rope, you would just create a 1⁄2 foot rope, and that would take you 1⁄2 the time as creating 1 foot of rope.” And for The David, I feel like “sure, but that doesn’t explain why someone wouldn’t just carve their own David if they wanted one”. I think I’m bypassing some of the issue here, but I’m not entirely sure what it is.
It does, however, bring up another interesting reason for trade (and this may be part of how investment can be independent from efficiency of scale): shared resources. If a pair of scissors does not scale according to how often I use them, and I only use them once per day, I can increase efficiency/decrease required investment by trading their use so others can use them when I’m not. This applies to the the David as such: utility gained from the David is not zero sum, multiple people can utility from it without decreasing the utility the others gain; therefore it does not make sense for everyone to carve their own. So any time a resource or product produces non-zero sum benefits if it exists, we have a reason for it’s use to be traded/trade to be involved in sharing it.
Applying this, if 5 people each carve a statue and put them in a sculpture garden in exchange for access to the garden, they can each enjoy five statues (alternatively, they could collaborate to build the statue in 1/5th the time and share in the enjoyment of it).
Not sure this is what you were getting at, but I think I’ve talked myself into thinking that when investment has independence from efficiency of scale it’s because of the non-zero sum nature of some shared resources.
Hmm. I feel like it’s relevant that your example relies on trade, which we’re trying to eliminate. Therefore, if all of the other reasons for trade go away, this example would be irrelevant.
But can we recreate it elsewhere? Perhaps there is some task which is time sensitive, but cannot be done by one person (in their remaining marginal time) at a speed which does not decrease marginal gains. Information sharing comes to mind, but that seems to have already been accomplished by the society outlined above.
C.S. Lewis addressed the issue of faith in Mere Christianity as follows:
In one sense Faith means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people—at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue—what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then— and a good many people do not see still—was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other. When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, “Perhaps she’ll be different this time,” and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water—or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down. Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
Although many religious people use the word differently, this is how I use Faith, and I propose that it would be an acceptable one to facilitate this discussion: a determination to hold on to what you have already established a high confidence level in, despite signals you may have received from less rational sources (i.e. emotions).
No problem. Looks like that will be the soonest I’ll be able to make it as well.
Looks like SSC meetups are still ongoing: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ifsZbNmHwxhCm7F4n/slate-star-codex-meetup?commentId=ZccQoDDQY2skHDsAY#ZccQoDDQY2skHDsAY
Cool, thanks for sharing.
I posted about my academic research interest here, do you know their research well enough to give input on whether my interests would be compatible? I would love to find a way to do my PhD in Europe, but especially Germany.
A few observations.
First, it seems likely that the increase in positivity can be explained by fewer precautionary tests: fewer people are getting tested “just to be sure”, fewer people are being required by work/travel/etc. to get tested. Therefore fewer negative tests.
Second, it seems likely to me that the “93%, 93%, 91%” numbers are calculated independently from each other. I.e. 93% less likely to contract than unvaccinated, 93% less likely to hospitalize than unvaccinated, and the vaccinated group was 91% less likely to die than the unvaccinated group. So with alpha, all probabilities were reduced ~uniformly. Now consider a variant (delta) where the vaccine is not as effective at reducing symptoms of any level, but is still ~as effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths. This would decrease the likelihood of the vaccine preventing a positive test or symptoms, while not changing the hospitalization/deaths numbers much. This makes sense in my head, but perhaps there’s something I’m missing?
Finally, a typo that tripped me up a bit:
We should also look at case counts in Israel. On June 18 they had 1.92 cases per million, right before things started rising, on June 14 it was 65.09, for R0 = 1.97. From previous data, we can presume that when Delta was a very small portion of Israeli cases, the control system adjusted things to something like R0 = 1, so we’ll keep that number in mind.
The second “June” should be “July”, as in “July 14”. (Small nitpick, I know, but it took me a minute to work out, so I figured I’d share.)
I’ve started formalizing my research proposal, so I now have:
I intend to use computational game theory, system modeling, cognitive science, causal inference, and operations research methods to explore the ways in which AI systems can produce unintended consequences and develop better methods to anticipate outer alignment failures.Can anyone point me to existing university research along these lines? I’ve made some progress after finding this thread, and I’m now planning to contact FHI about their Research Scholar’s Programme, but I’m still finding it a little time-consuming to try to match specific ongoing research with a given University or professor, so if anyone can point me to any other university programs (or professors to contact) which would fit well with my interests, that would be super helpful.
Yeah, I think we’re in agreement. I can’t think why there would ever be a minimum, except to exceed the break-even point on fixed costs.
Any chance this will be resuming any time soon?
I agree with both, but claim that they are, in a sense, the same problem: if you solve the economy of scale issue, along with the parameters above, people would simply produce the amount desired with no diminishing marginal return problem on consumption.
Unfortunately, a car is an unavoidable cost for me, I expect that is a large part of the difference.
I do have a car, but I don’t even live in the bay area and didn’t realize how many of you were in Berkeley. Makes sense now.
I think I underestimated how much of the Rationalist community was in the bay area. That fact alone resolves most of my confusion, thank you.
Isn’t 2 just a product of 1? If 1 were not true, couldn’t you just get started at small scale? This may be understood, but if not, it seems useful to point out the entanglement.
Also, another aspect of the insurance is spoilage: some goods preserve better than others, so it makes sense to convert excess into something stable so that you can “self insure”.