Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# Whence decision exhaustion?

Many people experience something we might call decision or executive exhaustion: after making a lot of decisions, it can be hard to make more decisions and to exert "willpower". Yet, this seems odd because we are constantly making decisions all the time in some sense, choosing to do what we do over everything else we could have otherwise done. So, what and why do we sometimes get exhausted of making decisions when most of the time we do not?

Some notes to consider in answering:

*   Some people seem to experience this from all decisions and are worn out after dozens of minutes of being awake.
*   Some people seem to never experience this.
*   Exhausting decisions seem more salient or like they require more deliberate thought than ones that are not exhausting. Non-exhausting decisions feel automatic.
*   Food and rest (but not a full nights sleep) helps some people recover decision function but not everyone seems to respond to this over short enough timescales for it to be useful for recovering functionality within the day.
# How can we measure creativity?

  

Status: have spent about two hours on this.

As part of measuring how [marginal productivity changes over time](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pWiAuhBmWskgESM4R/how-long-can-people-be-productive-in-time-period), I need to know how to assess creativity. One promising test for that is the [Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrance_Tests_of_Creative_Thinking), in which subjects are given an open ended prompt, and graded on their answers. Answers are evaluated by a human being for fluency, originality, abstractness of titles, elaboration and resistance to premature closure [(sample questions for the curious).](https://www.lesswrong.com/(https://www.testingmom.com/tests/torrance-test/sample-torrance-practice-questions/).) But does the TTCT predict anything we actually care about?

The creator of the tests studied their predictive ability in a longitudinal study that lasted 50 years so far. The [40 year follow up](https://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Silvio_Brito/post/Does_anyone_have_or_know_how_to_use_Torrance_Creative_Thinking_Test/attachment/59d62e3f79197b807798c759/AS:353441776979968%401461278494209/download/Gifted%2BChild%2BQuarterly-2005-Cramond-283-91.pdf&hl=en&sa=T&oi=gsb-gga&ct=res&cd=0&d=3110599026930717657&ei=ILgSXebnLoauyATokbOAAQ&scisig=AAGBfm2mBun_3iZK-L8QMF-1FUub_HcSaA) showed good-for-social-sciences correlation between childhood TTCT scores and adult creative achievement, although IQ had a stronger correlation. The [50 year follow up](https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2010.523393) (conducted by different experimenters) found no correlation between score and "public achievement" unless combined with IQ. Given that these studies were subject to the usual social science weaknesses, multiplied by 50 years and subjective grading, I do not count this as strong evidence.

A [smaller study in Brazil](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15326934crj1801_3) found adulthood scores of recognized creative achievers and non-achievers to vary.

Basic googling found more academics saying both disparaging ([beginning of page 310](http://users.rider.edu/~baer/BaerTTCTDebate.pdf)) and [encouraging](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.587.3752&rep=rep1&type=pdf) things.

My default assumption is that psychometric tests are invalid, and this evidence isn't enough to make me change my mind. But I don't have anything better to use for my actual goal, which is a measurable task that taxes creativity and \*nothing else\*, and this has a certain face validity to it. Does anyone have information to sway on the validity of the test, or an alternative test to use?
# Do children lose 'childlike curiosity?' Why?

A common story goes:

Young children love asking 'why', and they often have an earnest curiosity about it that is rare in adults. Something about the process of growing up seems to cause that childlike curiosity to stagnate.

There's a lot of compelling explanations about societal norms that actively stamp out that curiosity (i.e. school training kids to conform and regurgitate facts, parents subtly punishing kids for asking questions, etc). It seems likely to me that these are at least part of the story.

But it also wasn't obvious that they were the whole story. I could easily imagine it also just being the case that small children are optimized for learning and older humans are optimized for doing and the brain automatically shifts away from it. \[edit: or that this whole thing is imagined\]

Are there any cross-cultural studies that do anything to check how this phenomenon varies, depending on upbringing?
# Is AlphaZero any good without the tree search?

One component of AlphaZero is a neural net which takes a board position as input, and outputs a guess about how good the position is and what a good next move would be. It combines this neural net with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) that plays out different ways the game could go, before choosing the move. The MCTS is used both during self-play to train the neural net, and during competitive test-time. I'm mainly curious about whether the latter is necessary.

So my question is: Once you have the fully-trained AlphaZero system, if you then turn off the MCTS and just choose moves directly with the neural net policy head, is it any good? Is it professional-level, amateur-level, child-level?

(I think this would be a fun little data-point related to discussions of how powerful an AI can be with and without [mesa-optimization](https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/r9tYkB2a8Fp4DN8yB) / search-processes using a generative environmental model.)
# The Competence Myth

When I was a kid, everything seemed sort of goofy, but there was also a sense that it wasn't really _supposed_ to be competent. Yes, a lot of stuff targeted at kids was obviously dumb and bad, but it was for kids after all -- grown-ups knew what they were doing, and once we were grown up we wouldn't have to deal with that!

Once I became a teenager, it became pretty obvious that grown-ups didn't always know what they were doing either. \[1\] But there was still a sense that at the _next_ level people would finally know what was going on, and that sense persisted for some time - perhaps soon it was "college students", then it was "professors", then it was "people in the private sector", then it was "experienced workers at more professional organizations"... at every level, after every hurdle, it turned out that things were about as slapdash and incompetent as before. It wasn't always the same exact patterns, but there was always _something_ going wrong, and there was never the sense of "okay, now I can fully Trust the System".

Maybe the final straw came when I read or heard something from (IIRC) a Navy SEAL, who said that even in the SEAL teams there were people who were incompetent - in other words, even after extremely stringent training and selection processes that would be illegal for any normal organization to implement, they were still unable to achieve that fabled "okay, finally we're at a stage where everyone knows what they're doing".

Now, I'm not saying every single group is always and forever going to be incompetent - but what I am saying is that I wasted a lot of time thinking "oh, things are messed up now but once I reach this next educational/professional milestone, everything will be fine!" In point of fact that's just not the case, and you should plan accordingly. Almost regardless of what level of vetting and selection you implement, there will be some people who slip through the cracks, and there will be some systems or processes that aren't so good. \[2\] Lastly, if anyone can think of any large groups or organizations where this isn't the case, please tell me what they are! I'd love to be proven wrong on this.

  

\[1\] A school administrator once accused me of drawing something he described as "a pagan symbol from The Da Vinci Code" on some pillars in chalk. It was a simple design that I had made up in a notebook and thought looked good; I had never read The Da Vinci Code and had put up the symbols as a joke. The concept that the administration had investigated it and come to this conclusion was truly bizarre to me.

\[2\] This isn't an argument that you shouldn't vet or evaluate people at all, but rather one that you're unlikely to achieve perfection in such a process.
# What's the most "stuck" you've been with an argument, that eventually got resolved?

I was trying to write up a post about getting stuck in arguments, where you thought something was obvious, and said something like "A, therefore, B." And your partner says "but, X, therefore Y!"

And from you perspective, A is obviously true, and B obviously follows from A. And X and Y just don't seem relevant to you. But somehow, to your conversation partner, A and B either aren't obvious at all, or just seem... irrelevant somehow. And X and Y seem like the important things.

I feel like this happens often to me, but I didn't carefully keep track of them at the time. I'll try checking in with people I've disagreed with in the past to see if they can help jog my memory. But I'm curious if anyone has ran into this phenomenon?

A somewhat extreme but concrete example might be a consequentialist and a deontologist arguing about ethics, where the Connie the consequentialist says "We should throw the switch in the trolley problem to save lives" and Denny the Deontologist says "But you're murdering the guy on the tracks!" and both of them are coming at the problem from such different perspectives that they can't make any headway.

I'd ideally like examples that each involve positions that are fairly common on LessWrong.

(The important bit isn't precisely the "A therefore B", "X therefore Y" pattern, so much as the general phenomenon of feeling like the two participants were somehow managing to completely miss each other. Ideally, examples where the people eventually ended up on the same page, hopefully identifying the moment when the argument became "unstuck.")
# The Right Way of Formulating a Problem?

[David Chapman Writes](https://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think)[,](https://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think,)

> Finding a good formulation for a problem is often most of the work of solving it.

I agree with this intuitively, and I feel like I have seen this principle at work in my own work and in the problems I have tried to solve. However, when I try to convince others of this idea, I struggle to find examples that they can connect with or that they find compelling.

I suspect that programmers find this idea appealing because we routinely work with formal systems, and all of us know the experience of making a minor change in perspective and seeing an impossible problem turn into an easy one. So I'm most interested in examples that have nothing to do with code, examples that a lay audience would be able to grasp.

I would be _particularly_ interested in examples from the history of science or medicine, if anyone can think of some. [Scott and Scurvy](https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm) is the only example I currently know of, and while interesting, does not seem like a perfect fit.

Much appreciated!
# How/would you want to consume shortform posts?

The LessWrong team might be putting more work into the shortform concept in the next couple weeks. I wanted to check in about what specific features people might want for that.

Right now, some users set up "shortform feed" posts, which are a hacky way to give yourself a more casual space for off-the-cuff writing. In the past few weeks we've seen an uptick of people creating feeds for themselves.

It seemed useful to make this a bit more official (i.e. there's just a "create shortform post" button you can click instead of navigating to a post and writing a comment).

But there's several open questions about the best way to _consume_ shortform content. Right now most shortform comments appear in Recent Discussion and then quickly disappear, which is very low-discoverability.

Possible considerations include:

*   **Some people like low-discoverability.** Sometimes what you want is a low-visibility place where you can write up thoughts without people immediately judging you for it, to help flesh out early stage ideas. For those people, the status quo is sorta fine.
*   **Some people want more visibility.** I know I personally would prefer my shortform feed to get maybe 5x the visibility it currently gets – I care less about the visibility and more about the vibe of "low effort casual space."

There's a few possible routes to more visibility:

*   Treating shortform more as a special case, where new shortform posts get displayed at the top of recent discussion, or potentially each day listing on the Daily/AllPosts page. (This might include entire comments, or might include a quick list of which shortform feeds got updated recently)
*   More generally improve the visibility of comments on old posts, with shortform just being one type of old post. This has the benefit of making commenting on old posts feel less like shouting into the void.
*   Creating a special shortform feed view page, and/or create a setting on Recent Discussion where shortform becomes the primary thing you're skimming, rather than a mixture of post-discussion.

There might be entirely different frames or ideas I haven't thought of.

Anyone have preferences on how to consume shortform?

(Also relevant would be if you find shortform actively annoying and would want to make sure it didn't get too much in your way)
# Opting into Experimental LW Features

We recently added an "beta testing" option for LessWrong. If you go to [your account page](https://www.lesswrong.com/account), you'll see a checkbox for _"Opt into experimental features"._

Right now, the primary feature under development that isn't yet released to the public is _Single Line Comments._ This is an attempt to fit more overall comments in some areas.

**Recent Discussion**
---------------------

For example, recent discussion now looks like this, where each post loads 4 comments (and highlights them if you haven't read them), but only shows significant amounts of text from the most recent comment:

![](https://i.imgur.com/gg6iUJw.png)

You can click on a recent discussion item to mark that item as 'read', and make the green line go away.

**Posts with 50+ Comments**
---------------------------

On posts with 50 or more comments, comments below 10 karma will appear as a single-line comment:

![](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/v1562175258/Screen_Shot_2019-07-03_at_10.33.43_AM_lkvl2l.png)

Mousing over a SingleLineComment will show a hovercard with a preview of the comment.

Clicking on a thread will fully expand all of the children of the comment that you clicked on. Doing a search (**Control+F,** or **Command+F)** will also expand all comments (so that you won't run into annoying things where you try to search but the comment isn't displaying all the text so you can't find the quote you're looking for.

This is all still under developed. Admins of the site have been using it for the past month or two to see how it works, and tweaking it until it felt usable. It's now at a point where it seemed good to let other LW users try it out and see if it seems like an improvement.

(Before releasing it publicly, we plan to build some sort of safety-valve-checkbox where you can turn it off easily)
# Open Thread July 2019

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, you can put it here.

Also, if you are new to LessWrong and want to introduce yourself, this is the place to do it. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are welcome. If you want to explore the community more, I recommend [reading the Library](https://www.lesswrong.com/library), [checking recent Curated posts](https://www.lesswrong.com/?view=curated), and [seeing if there are any meetups in your area](https://www.lesswrong.com/community).

The Open Thread sequence is [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/yai5mppkuCHPQmzpN).
# What was the official story for many top physicists congregating in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project?

There is a consensus among most people I know that *if* top researchers are necessary for the successful development of AGI, then it would be impossible to do in in secrecy, because the world would notice top AI researchers leaving their jobs and congregating at a military facility.

But the US government did pull this off with physicists. How?
# What's state-of-the-art in AI understanding of theory of mind?

Sparked by [Eric Topol](http://www.econtalk.org/eric-topol-on-deep-medicine/), I've been thinking lately about biological complexity, psychology, and AI safety.

A prominent concern in the AI safety community is the problem of [instrumental convergence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence) – for almost any terminal goal, agents will converge on instrumental goals are helpful for furthering the terminal goal, e.g. self-preservation.

The story goes something like this:

*   AGI is given (or arrives at) a terminal goal
*   AGI learns that self-preservation is important for increasing its chances of achieving its terminal goal
*   AGI learns enough about the world to realize that humans are a substantial threat to its self-preservation
*   AGI finds a way to address this threat (e.g. by killing all humans)

It occurred to me that to be really effective at finding & deploying a way to kill all humans, the AGI would probably need to know a lot about human biology (and also markets, bureaucracies, supply chains, etc.).

We humans don't have yet a clean understanding of human biology, and it doesn't seem like an AGI could get to a superhuman understanding of biology without running many more empirical tests (on humans), which would be pretty easy to observe.

Then it occurred to me that maybe the AGI doesn't actually to know a lot about human biology to develop a way to kill all humans. But it seems like it would still need to have a worked-out [theory of mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind), just to get to the point of understanding that humans are agent-like things that could bear on the AGI's self-preservation.

So now I'm curious about where the state of the art is for this. From my (lay) understanding, it doesn't seem like [GPT-2](https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/) has anything approximating a theory of mind. Perhaps OpenAI's [Dota](https://openai.com/five/) system or DeepMind's [AlphaStar](https://deepmind.com/blog/alphastar-mastering-real-time-strategy-game-starcraft-ii/) is the state of the art here, theory-of-mind-wise? (To be successful at Dota or Starcraft, you need to understand that there are other things in your environment that are agent-y & will work against you in some circumstances.)

Curious what else is in the literature about this, and also about how important it seems to others.
# What are good resources for learning functional programming?

I'm looking to use [the 3 Books Technique](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oPEWyxJjRo4oKHzMu/the-3-books-technique-for-learning-a-new-skilll) to learn functional programming. Does anyone have any "What", "Why' or "How" resources for functional programming (or resources that don't fit the categories?)
# How to handle large numbers of questions?

Within a few weeks, I expect to have gotten the Related Questions feature up to a standard where it makes sense to start using it a lot.

Even if I were the \*only\* one using it extensively, I'd expect to generate very large numbers of questions. (For two frames of reference, imagine if every answer to the [Open Problems in Human Rationality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gX8fcAwk3HGkFyJgk/what-are-the-open-problems-in-human-rationality) had been a related question. For another, see Ruby's [Space Colonization: What can we do and how do we know?](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NZiDAY9b4mZeRWbRc/space-colonization-what-can-we-definitely-do-and-how-do-we) post (which has 8 related questions)

The currently planned tools will let people set whether each related question appears on the home page or not (but, to have all related questions appear in recent discussion).

I feel sorta differently-worried about each way to turn this knob. Either related questions _won't_ get enough visibility for people to actually see the ones that are interesting to them, or it'll get so much visibility that it'll drown out the site. The "optionally make related questions on home page" helps somewhat, but still leaves me with a sense that a lot of related questions will end up not getting seen by people most inclined to answer them.
# How to make a giant whiteboard for $14 (plus nails)

All my friends love whiteboards, because they’re giant nerds. It’s only a good party when somebody starts trying to illustrating a point on the whiteboard. Also, to-do lists you can’t miss.

This isn’t my idea, but it’s good and I thought I’d share it. Home Depot and Lowes sell a material called [“thrify white panelling”](https://www.homedepot.com/p/EUCATILE-32-sq-ft-96-in-x-48-in-Hardboard-Thrifty-White-Tile-Board-HDDPTW48/205995949) or [“smooth white hardboard”](https://www.lowes.com/pd/47-75-in-x-7-98-ft-Smooth-White-Hardboard-Wall-Panel/3015239). It’s cheap – mine was about $14 for a 4-foot-by-8-foot sheet. I asked the store staff to cut the panel in half so it would fit in my car, which they did for free.

It’s easily chipped, so watch out if you want it to look flawless.

Then I stuck it to the wall of my studio apartment. I used some kind of drywall anchor to screw it on, with washers, to get a good grip on the material. (I think using a drywall anchor was overkill, and can’t recommend them for renters until I see how cleanly they come out of the wall – so if you have a better low-damage attachment system, maybe try that first. I wasn’t able to get them to stick with Command velcro strips – the strips kept detaching from the panel material – but other people on the internet seem to have found success in this.)

![alt  text](https://eukaryotewritesblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/20190707_1455202.jpg "Image of large whiteboard hanging over my desk")

It acts as a whiteboard as-is. Writing gets hard to erase if you leave it up there for a long time, but you can clean it with whiteboard-cleaning-solution, alcohol, or by coloring over the marks with another whiteboard marker and then erasing that. Internet people also report that you can buff the entire surface with [turtle wax](https://smile.amazon.com/Turtle-Wax-T-5A-Carnauba-Cleaner/dp/B0006302KY) before hanging it, and this makes it more stain-resistant.

I didn’t do that, and it’s still pretty good, especially for $14.

Let me know if you try this!

(Possibly relevant: [Andrew Critch's giant notepad for better thinking](http://acritch.com/notepad/))
# Is the sum individual informativeness of two independent variables no more than their joint informativeness? 

Is it true that:

If I(X;Y) = 0 then I(S;X) + I(S;Y) <= I(S;X,Y)

Can you find a counterexample, or prove this and teach me your proof?

Someone showed me a simple analytic proof. I am still interested in seeing different ways people might prove this though.
# NIST: draft plan for AI standards development

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a part of the United States Department of Commerce, has released a [draft plan](https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2019/07/02/plan_for_ai_standards_publicreview_2july2019.pdf) for public comment. It was released July 02; comments are accepted until July 19; the final plan is due August 10. It is 36 pages long, including the boilerplate.

This is the early phase of the regulatory process. Whatever the plan winds up containing, it will form an important part of future decisions made by the US government.

I strongly believe it is a good idea to provide safety-related comments during this and all future public comment windows. It is not clear to me what the most influential kind of comment would be, nor is it clear to me what the best perspective on safety would be for a standards board. This causes me to expect that comments running the gamut on safety would be desirable. The default answer when a significant public concern is raised seems to be "we see this is important and will look into it going forward" which also seems (to me) to be the most-correct answer at this time.
# How can I help research Friendly AI?

I've just started my journey toward a PhD in machine learning. My first steps are in computer vision. But my long term goal is to be able to help in the effort to solve the alignment problem and produce Friendly AI before any non-friendly alternatives emerge.

What sort of trajectory should I aim for with my research? What sort of post-PhD jobs should I be aiming for? Who should I be making contacts with as I go?
# Are there easy, low cost, ways to freeze personal cell samples for future therapies? And is this a good idea?

I happened to come across [this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nzeNA7TjmFeNHXhhp/an-alarming-fact-about-the-anti-aging-community) old post from 2015, that (in a sort of round about way) endorses freezing some cell samples _today_, because having frozen cell samples from your youth might prove important for future anti-aging therapies.

I am somewhat skeptical of this being a major factor for anti-aging, but I wonder if others have more information.
# Diversify Your Friendship Portfolio

In investing, a common piece of advice recommends a diversified portfolio - in other words, having investments from a wide range of areas to avoid a crash in one area wiping out all your investments. Similarly, I have found that it can be beneficial to have a diversified _friendship_ portfolio - in other words, friends across a wide range of communities or social circles.

For instance, I have a group of friends that I've known mostly since elementary/middle school, a group of friends that I know from the rationalist and EA community in Berkeley, a group of friends that I know from playing certain games competitively... there is some overlap between these groups, but by and large they are separate, and this can be quite valuable.

Because I'm active in multiple circles, if strange things are happening in one community I can step into another. If I need advice on a sensitive situation, I have people who know me well and aren't close to the matter to draw upon. Further, having these sorts of resources and perspectives available can open up options that might otherwise be difficult - if, for instance, I decided I could no longer be a part of one of those communities, leaving wouldn't be the end of my social life.

I sometimes see people -- in the rationalist community or elsewhere -- putting "all their eggs in one basket" when it comes to friendship, and I think that can often lead to pitfalls. If all your friends are from work, what happens if you leave your job? If all your friends are from a certain hobby, what happens if you get bored of it? If all your friends are from a certain social scene, what happens if there's a bunch of drama and that community splits? Having other social connections and communities to interact with can really help with such scenarios.

Lastly, I want to point out that having a range of friend groups can be a useful insulator against bad ideas. \[1\] Sometimes strange and unwelcome fads can spread across a community, and if that's the case it can suddenly become a less appealing place. If you have several friend groups to choose from, such things are much easier to "ride out" than if your whole social circle is suddenly into whatever new weird thing. Further, being able to run new stuff by people you know in other communities can serve as a good check on groupthink - being able to say "hey, a bunch of my friends in Berkeley are getting into X, does that make much sense to you?" can be quite a useful reality check!

  

\[1\] One caveat to this -- if you notice that certain friends or communities constantly seem to drag you in bad directions, it might well be time to move away from them!
# Do bond yield curve inversions really indicate there is likely to be a recession?

I've seen some recent commentary that the bond yield curve indicates there is likely to be a recession in the next year.

For example, from the New York fed:[  
https://www.newyorkfed.org/…/r…/capital\_markets/Prob\_Rec.pdf](fed:
https://www.newyorkfed.org/…/r…/capital_markets/Prob_Rec.pdf)

and commentary:

[https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/capital\_markets/Prob\_Rec.pdf](https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/capital_markets/Prob_Rec.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/…/government-bond-market-measure-says-r…)[  
https://www.wsj.com/…/government-bond-market-measure-says-r…](https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/capital_markets/Prob_Rec.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/…/government-bond-market-measure-says-r…)

I'm not sure how much stock to put into this, or for that matter what actions I should take if I expected there would be a recession in the next year.

Two part question:

*   How much confidence should I have in the yield curve inversion signal that a recession would happen by July 1st, 2020?
*   If I expected there would be a recession, what actions make sense to take as a personal investor? Or even more generally?
# How can guesstimates work?

_\[Epistemic status: background is very hand-wavy, but I'd rather post a rough question than no question at all. I'm very confident that the two ingredients -- illegible cultural evolution and guesstimation -- are real and important things. Though the relation between the two is more uncertain. I'm not that surprised if my question ends up confused and dissolved rather than solved by answers.\]_

For a large part of human history, our lives were dictated by cultural norms and processes which appeared arbitrary, yet could have fatal consquences if departed from. (C.f. SSC on [The Secret of Our Success](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zm7WAJMTaFvuh2Wc7/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success), which will be assumed background knowledge for this question.)

Today, we live in a world where you can achieve huge gains if you simply "shut up and multiply". The world seems _legible_ \-\- I can roughly predict how many planes fly every day by multiplying a handful rough numbers. And the world seems _editable_ \-\- people who like to cook often improvise: exchanging, adding and removing ingredients. And this seems fine. It certainly doesn't _kill_ them. Hugely succesful companies are built around the principle of "just try things until something breaks and then try again and improve".

I still think there are still large amounts of illegible cultural knowledge encoded in institutions, traditions, norms, etc. But something still seems very different from the horror stories of epistemic learned helplessness Scott shared.

**What changed about the world to make this possible? How can guesstimates work?**

Some hypotheses (none of which I'd put more than 15% on atm):

*   Almost all important aspects of our lives our governed by some kind of technology that _we_ built (tables, airplanes, computers, rugs, restaurants, microwaves, legal contracts, clocks, beds, clothes, ... _and so on and so forth_). Technological development outpaced cultural evolution. The modern world is more legible and editable for the same reason that a codebase is more legible and editable than DNA.
*   Most systems that govern our lives have been optimised way harder since the industrial revolution and the ability to achieve economies-of-scale in a global market. Things are generally closer to optimal equilibria, and equilibria are more legible/predictable than non-quilibria.
*   The things we really care about today often follow very heavy-tailed distributions. Hence even a very rough guesstimate is like to get the ordering of choices correct. (This can't be the whole story, because guesstimates also seem to work in pretty Gaussian domains.)
*   We just have better medical and welfare systems which allow people to take more risks.
# Please give your links speaking names!

Bad:

> Shrimping is a fundamental drill for grappling, according to [this article](https://www.grapplearts.com/ultimate-guide-developing-bjj-hip-movement-shrimping/).

Good:

> Shrimping is a fundamental drill for grappling, according to [The Ultimate Guide to Developing BJJ Hip Movement Through Shrimping](https://www.grapplearts.com/ultimate-guide-developing-bjj-hip-movement-shrimping/).

Why is this important? So that people who print your articles know what you're referencing.

Why would anyone print an article? In order to be able to annotate it more easily, and to read with more context. Try it! Instead of scrolling back and forth in that complicated essay you're reading on a thirteen inch laptop, print it and spread *six pages* on the desk. I read many articles on AI alignment issues and printing them helps a lot.
# Modeling AI milestones to adjust AGI arrival estimates?

Is there a roadmap of major milestones AI researchers have to achieve through before AGI is here? I feel like this would be beneficial to update on AGI arrival timelines and adjust actions accordingly. Lately, a lot of things that can be classified as a milestone have been achieved -- GLUE benchmark, StarCraft II, DOTA 2 etc. Should we adjust our estimates on AGI arrival based on those or are they moving according to plan? It would be cool to have a place with all forecasts on AGI in one place.
# How much background technical knowledge do LW readers have?

When writing posts, it would be useful to know how much background technical knowledge LW readers have in various areas.

To that end, I set up a short [six-question survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdpEev_-vPM0lihVTHYVxUGeaUiomrTNlxYY8Mf8SLK1OZ1Og/viewform). Please take it, so I (and others) can write posts better fit to your level of technical background. If your answer to all of the questions is "zero-ish technical knowledge", please take it, so you're not inundated with mathy posts. If your answer to all of the questions is "I am secretly [John Von Neumann](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann)", please take the survey, so the rest of us know there's someone like that around. If you are somewhere in the middle, please take the survey. It'll take, like, maybe sixty seconds.

Here's that link again: [survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdpEev_-vPM0lihVTHYVxUGeaUiomrTNlxYY8Mf8SLK1OZ1Og/viewform).
# Bystander effect false?

Can someone check [this link out](https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/07/bystander-effect-stranger-danger-crime-public-safety-video/593755/) and see whether the methodology is actually sound?

One-line summary is that Surveillance Cameras Debunk the Bystander Effect H/T [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20417986).

More broadly I'm interested in anyone's sense of whether the bystander effect replicates, and whether the corresponding concept is misleading (and I should use something else instead).
# What are we predicting for Neuralink event?

Interesting exercise in AI-adjacent forecasting area (brain-computer interfaces). Curious if people want to specify some possible reveals+probabilities. [https://twitter.com/neuralink/status/1149133717048188929](https://twitter.com/neuralink/status/1149133717048188929)

(if in the somewhat likely scenario you're relying on inside info please mention it)
# Overcoming Akrasia/Procrastination - Volunteers Wanted

**Edit:** Cohorts are basically full for now, will let people know if spaces open up.

I've got some new material I'm working on a related to overcoming procrastination and akrasia. It breaks down the skill of focus/willpower into seven "mental habits" that when stacked, are what you need to overcome procrastination. I wrote a bit more about what the habits are [on my Shortform Feed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2XikYzeL39HoSSTr/matt-goldenberg-s-short-form-feed#Br3c4sjkDE9zhug3i).

I'd love to test teaching the material with a few cohorts before I finalize it into a course. The commitment would be 30 minutes a day for 7 days, free for the first few cohorts. The sessions are about 1/3 teaching, 2/3 practice of the skills. If anyone here is interested let me know.
# Offering public comment in the Federal rulemaking process

This is a short linkdump of useful resources in the event you are planning to make a public comment on the AI standards. In the main these recommendations are intuitive: it helps to be an expert; identify exactly what document you are referring to; speak directly to your concern; use citations; etc.

How to comment on a rule, from the Center for Effective Government: [https://www.foreffectivegov.org/node/4059](https://www.foreffectivegov.org/node/4059)

How public comment works, from the Public Comment Project:

[https://publiccommentproject.org/how-it-works](https://publiccommentproject.org/how-it-works)

Tips for submitting effective comments, from Regulations.gov:

[https://www.regulations.gov/docs/Tips\_For\_Submitting\_Effective\_Comments.pdf](https://www.regulations.gov/docs/Tips_For_Submitting_Effective_Comments.pdf)

How to effectively comment on regulations, from the Brookings Institute:

[https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ES\_20180809\_RegComments.pdf](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/ES_20180809_RegComments.pdf)

Examples of public comments, from the Public Comment Project:

[https://publiccommentproject.org/comment-examples-index#examples-aqcons](https://publiccommentproject.org/comment-examples-index#examples-aqcons)
# How Can Rationalists Join Other Communities Interested in Truth-Seeking?

Last week, Davis Kingsley wrote about reasons one might want to [diversify one's "friendship portfolio."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s6eMPmSJTYHNjpH6y/diversify-your-friendship-portfolio#vSvoHjTS4DAcgc7tf) I commented that if this, being on LessWrong, was aimed at a rationalist audience, it's my experience many rationalists are introverted or shy enough, some have difficulty joining new groups of friends outside the rationality community as well (though of course there were several comments on Davis' posts about the benefits of having just a small, consistent group of friends in a single community, worth considering). However, Ruby commented with an even greater reason why some rationalists who might want friends beyond the rationality community nonetheless primarily stick to the rationality community:

> I suspect there are challenges for rationalists in joining new communities beyond introversion. I've found it jarring to be getting along with some new folk and then people start saying ridiculous things, but worse, having no real interest in determining whether the things they say are actually true. Or even when they try, being terrible at discussion. I don't need to nitpick everything or correct every "wrong" thing I hear, but it is hard to feel like beliefs aren't real to people - they're just things you say. A performance.

> There are people outside the rationality community who are fine at the above, but being used to rationalists does introduce some novel challenges. It'd be nice if we ever accumulated communal knowledge on how to bridge such cultural gaps.

So, I thought I would ask.
# Intellectual Dark Matter

#### Knowledge that we can show exists, but cannot directly access, rests at the foundations of society and technology.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*ASyKIkImbO03BbSG)

_Messier 106_

_From [my post](https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/intellectual-dark-matter-2e5890aa8d8f) published on the [Long Now Foundation](http://longnow.org/)'s blog. This is an excerpt from the draft of_ _[my upcoming book](http://samoburja.com/gft)_ _on great founder theory._

### Missing mass, missing knowledge

Many galaxies would fly apart if they had as much mass as estimates based on their visible signature suggest. Although some have posited alternative theories of gravitation to explain this discrepancy, most physicists now hypothesize the existence of mass-bearing particles that are not detectable through emitted radiation such as visible light. We call these particles dark matter, and it is estimated to compose about 85% of all matter in the observable universe.

In analyzing the [functional institutions](https://medium.com/@samo.burja/functional-institutions-are-the-exception-9a1c6974aa09) of our society, we are not able to see for ourselves most of the knowledge that created them. Knowledge of this sort includes trade secrets, tacit technical knowledge, private social networks, private intelligence-gathering operations, management and persuasive skill, cooperation and collusion among founders and their allies, and founders’ long-term plans for their institutions.¹

This knowledge has [profound effects](https://medium.com/@samo.burja/great-founder-theory-93751e25c173) on the social landscape. We must understand it if we hope to understand society. We therefore must examine **intellectual dark matter**: knowledge we cannot see publicly, but whose existence we can infer because our institutions would fly apart if the knowledge we see were all there was.³ Such intellectual dark matter rests at the foundations of our society, dwarfing in scope and importance the accessible, shareable, visible knowledge on which we normally focus.

There are many forms of intellectual dark matter, but the three principal ones are lost, proprietary, and tacit knowledge.

_Read the rest [here](https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/intellectual-dark-matter-2e5890aa8d8f)._

_Read more from Samo Burja_ _[here.](http://samoburja.com/essays)_
# Nutrition is Satisficing

_Reason for writing: I didn't see a clear, unambiguous explanation of this concept when I did a search on LW._

_Epistemic status: Confident, **but this is a normative claim, not a descriptive one**. Skip if you hate normies._

Eat plenty of vegetables. Drink plenty of water. Get enough protein.

For the average person in a developed nation, mixing these 3 heuristics into their current nutritional profile is likely to improve their health. I don't know if anyone has actually penned a [distance function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric)  p:Nutrition→R that lets us rank how good or bad someone's nutrition \*is\*, but I'm pretty sure that if you aren't following these 3 heuristics, and then you start, p(you2) will be greater than p(you1), even if you're inconsistent.

Past general heuristics, we run into a problem when we try to compare _specific_ foods to find the best one in a given class. For example: is rotisserie chicken or canned tuna better for your meal plan? That's a question of moderate difficulty to answer; we would need information such as

*   The nutritional profiles of the chicken and the tuna,
*   Whether you prefer the taste of one or the other, and
*   How much you're willing to spend and the relative prices of both in your area. (Fun fact: A [1200 calorie $7 rotisserie chicken](https://www.eatthismuch.com/food/nutrition/whole-original-rotisserie-chicken,176063/) from a supermarket is actually less expensive, calorie-per-calorie, than a 120 calorie $1 can of tuna. Otherwise it would be >$10.)

But there are _dozens_ of common kinds of common protein sources out there, and they all can all be prepared in so many different ways. When you factor in meal prep and individual variation and all the different kinds of recipes you can make, finding the "best" food for any given metric honestly starts to look intimidating.

The answer? Don't look for the best; look for good enough. Nutrition is satisficing. Take some time to learn some general heuristics about nutrition, don't be afraid to explore randomly a bit at the supermarket, but also don't stress out about your own nutrition once you've got a few solid principles in place.
# Very Short Introduction to Bayesian Model Comparison 

At least within Bayesian probability, there is a single unique unambiguously-correct answer to "how should we penalize for model complexity?": calculate the probability of each model, given the data. This is Hard to compute in general, which is why there's a whole slew of of other numbers which approximate it in various ways.

Here's how it works. Want to know whether model 1 or model 2 is more consistent with the data? Then compute  P\[model1|data\] and P\[model2|data\]. Using Bayes' rule:

P\[modeli|data\]=1ZP\[data|modeli\]P\[modeli\]

where Z is the normalizer. If we're just comparing two models, then we can get rid of that annoying Z by computing odds for the two models:

P\[model1|data\]P\[model2|data\]=P\[data|model1\]P\[data|model2\]P\[model1\]P\[model2\]

In English: posterior relative odds of the two models is equal to prior odds times the ratio of likelihoods. That likelihood ratio P\[data|model1\]P\[data|model2\] is the [Bayes factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes_factor): it directly describes the update in the relative odds of the two models, due to the data. Calculating the Bayes factor - i.e. P\[data|modeli\] for each model - is the main challenge of Bayesian model comparison.

**Example**
-----------

20 coin flips yield 16 heads and 4 tails. Is the coin biased?

Here we have two models:

*   Model 1: coin unbiased
*   Model 2: coin has some unknown probability θ of coming up heads (we'll use a uniform prior on θ for simplicity)

The second model has one free parameter (the bias) which we can use to fit the data, but it’s more complex and prone to over-fitting. When we integrate over that free parameter, it will fit the data poorly over most of the parameter space - thus the "penalty" associated with free parameters in general.

In this example, the integral is exactly tractable (it's a [dirichlet-multinomial model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirichlet-multinomial_distribution)), and we get:

*   P\[data|model1\]=(204)(12)16(12)4=0.0046
*   P\[data|model2\]=∫θ(204)(θ)16(1−θ)4dθ=0.048

So the Bayes factor is (.048)/(.0046) ~ 10, in favor of a biased coin. In practice, I'd say unbiased coins are at least 10x more likely than biased coins in day-to-day life a priori, so we might still think the coin is unbiased. But if we were genuinely unsure to start with, then this would be pretty decent evidence in favor.
# What is your Personal Knowledge Management system?

> Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a collection of processes that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve and share knowledge in their daily activities (Grundspenkis 2007) and the way in which these processes support work activities (Wright 2005). It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers need to be responsible for their own growth and learning (Smedley 2009). It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM) (Pollard 2008).

>  [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_management)

I am curious about how LessWrongers manage personal information, including but not limited to - research reading/ research output, side-projects/ hobbies, blogging, managing watchlist/ to-read list, social information, incremental-reading, making flashcards, threads-from-unfinished-conversations, braindumps, and maybe even general GTD-stuff.

Information about any of the following will be greatly appreciated. 

- **General framework/ philosophy for PKM.** 
Can be very concrete and well-defined like [Building a Second Brain](https://buildingasecondbrain.com) or a very a general rule-of-thumb like 'I bookmark everything/ I write down all thoughts in org-mode.'

- **Toolchain.**
What and How. Everything counts - wikis, org-mode, physical notebook, etc.

- **Workflow.**
Both _local_ (how you manage fuzzy and perpetually arriving information on a day-to-day basis) and _global_ (how you PKM for bigger and concrete projects over longer time).

- **Comparison of multiple frameworks, if used.**
- **Tips and tricks/ info about building PKM habits.**