Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# History of LessWrong: Some Data Graphics

Some graphs showing posting activity on LessWrong through the years.

*NOTE: If you’re reading this post on GreaterWrong, you can click on the images to enlarge, zoom in, and click through them all as a slideshow.*

Comments per post:

![](https://share.obormot.net/images/LW_comments_per_post_over_time.gif "Comments per post")

The same thing, on a log scale:

![](https://share.obormot.net/images/LW_comments_per_post_over_time_log.gif "Comments per post (log scale)")

Posts per month:

![](https://share.obormot.net/images/LW_posts_per_month.gif "Posts per month")

The 100 most prolific authors over LessWrong’s lifespan:

![](https://share.obormot.net/images/LW_100_most_prolific_authors.gif "The 100 most prolific authors over LessWrong’s lifespan")

The same thing, on a log scale:

![](https://share.obormot.net/images/LW_100_most_prolific_authors_log.gif "The 100 most prolific authors over LessWrong’s lifespan (log scale)")

Whose posts have generated the most *total* discussion?

![](https://share.obormot.net/images/LW_whose_posts_generated_most_discussion.gif "Whose posts have generated the most total discussion?")

As above, but on a log scale:

![](https://share.obormot.net/images/LW_whose_posts_generated_most_discussion_log.gif "Whose posts have generated the most total discussion? (log scale)")

Data available in [a Google Docs spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tGGs6FB6EWyNlqDFp64Ul21Fxs6L2Igb1lgM1cFIamY/edit#gid=0). (Or [download in CSV format](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tGGs6FB6EWyNlqDFp64Ul21Fxs6L2Igb1lgM1cFIamY/export?format=csv&id=1tGGs6FB6EWyNlqDFp64Ul21Fxs6L2Igb1lgM1cFIamY&gid=0).)

You can also download [an Excel spreadsheet](https://share.obormot.net/misc/Every_Less_Wrong_post_2018-11-15.xlsx), which contains the above graphs and some intermediate processed data.

*Edit 2018-11-16:* Updated data; corrected some minor abnormalities caused by data retrieval issue. (If you’ve downloaded the data already, please re-download the corrected versions—the links are the same.)
# Fixed Point Exercises

Sometimes people ask me what math they should study in order to get into agent foundations. My first answer is that I have found the introductory class in every subfield to be helpful, but I have found the later classes to be much less helpful. My second answer is to learn enough math to understand [all fixed point theorems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fixed-point_theorems). These two answers are actually very similar. Fixed point theorems span all across mathematics, and are central to (my way of) thinking about agent foundations.

This post is the start of a sequence on fixed point theorems. It will be followed by several posts of exercises that use and prove such theorems. While these exercises aren't directly connected to AI safety, I think they're quite useful for preparing to think about agent foundations research. Afterwards, I will discuss the core ideas in the theorems and where they've shown up in alignment research.

The math involved is not much deeper than a first course in the various subjects (logic, set theory, topology, computability theory, etc). If you don't know the terms, a bit of googling, wikipedia and math.stackexchange should easily get you most of the way. Note that the posts can be tackled in any order.

Here are some ways you can use these exercises:

*   You can host a local MIRIx group, and go through the exercises together. This might be useful to give a local group an affordance to work on math rather than only reading papers.
*   You can work on them by yourself for a while, and post questions when you get stuck. You can also post your solutions to help others, let others see an alternate way of doing a problem, or help you realize that there is a problem with your solution.
*   You can skip to the discussion (which has some spoilers), learn a bunch of theorems from Wikipedia, and use this as a starting point for trying to understand some MIRI papers.
*   You can use answering these questions as a goalpost for learning a bunch of introductory math from a large collection of different subfields.
*   You can show off by pointing out that some of the questions are wrong, and then I will probably fix them and thank you.

The first set of exercises is [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/svE3S6NKdPYoGepzq/topological-fixed-point-exercises).

_Thanks to Sam Eisenstat for helping develop these exercises, Ben Pace for helping edit the sequence, and many AISFP participants for testing them and noticing errors._

Meta
----

Read the following.

_Please use the (new) spoilers feature - the symbol '>' followed by '!' followed by space - in your comments to hide all solutions, partial solutions, and other discussions of the math. The comments will be moderated strictly to cover up spoilers!_

I recommend putting all the object level points in spoilers and leaving metadata outside of the spoilers, like so:

> Here's my solution / partial solution / confusion for question #5:

  

And put your idea in here! (reminder: LaTex is cmd-4 / ctrl-4)
# Ia! Ia! Extradimensional Cephalopod Nafl'fhtagn!

Hello, I'm ExCeph (short for Extradimensional Cephalopod). I've been mostly lurking here for the past decade and occasionally commenting within the past year or so. However, I never got around to actually introducing myself until now. It's good to meet you.

I was advised by a friend to actually write up a short bio, so here’s a bit about me.

\*starts puffing a bubble pipe\*

I grew up on science fiction and fantasy, plowing through satirical books such as the _Discworld_ series by Terry Pratchett and the _MythAdventures_ series by Robert Asprin, which inspired me to approach problems with a clear and critical mind.

One of my high school friends introduced me to both Less Wrong and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which resonated with me. I read [HPMOR](http://www.hpmor.com/) up through its then most recent update and moved on to other rational fiction, like [Luminosity](http://luminous.elcenia.com/) and [Elcenia](http://elcenia.com/). I also acquired an addiction to taste for reading [TVTropes](https://tvtropes.org/), which has [Enhanced My Life](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SugarWiki/TVTropesWillEnhanceYourLife). (But ask your doctor if TVTropes is right for you).

Reading through some Less Wrong and [Slate Star Codex](http://slatestarcodex.com/) articles about the inadequacy of existing institutions confirmed my childhood suspicions that humans didn’t really know what they were doing with the world. I became extremely frustrated that fixing these institutions was not a public priority, as if no one was aware of what was wrong or how to approach the situation.

It was the summer before my senior year of high school when I came up with the first version of my insanely ambitious plan to change the world, which has been my main project ever since. As part of the plan, I researched and tested different concepts and tools to improve my productivity and my ability to effect positive change in the world, with sporadic progress.

During my first job out of college, I reached out to find other people who wanted to change the world, and that led me to the local effective altruism community. As a result, I spent some time volunteering with an effective altruist organization. Eventually, through both the job and the EA organization, I discovered I was still missing some fundamental attributes that nobody responsible for my education had noticed or figured out how to instill in me.

Since then I've spent the past year and a half refining and practicing the tools and attributes I'd discovered, and am now ready to participate in the rationality community. I hope you find my suggestions and perspectives useful.

Okay, I’m out of bubble fluid. \*withdraws into the abyss\*
# [Link] "They go together: Freedom, Prosperity, and Big Government"

[Link to article](https://evonomics.com/freedom-prosperity-big-government/?utm_source=newsletter_campaign=organic)


> Our statistical investigations lead to two substantive conclusions:
> 
> First, the data appear to support notion that economic freedom makes a positive contribution to personal freedom and prosperity. That holds true whether we measure prosperity in a narrowly economic sense, as GDP per capita, or in a broader sense, using noneconomic indicators of education, health, and personal safety.  
> Second, the data do not support the notion that a larger government is necessarily detrimental to either freedom or prosperity.  On the contrary, countries with larger government sectors tend to have more personal freedom and higher indicators of education, health, and personal safety.
# [Insert clever intro here]

Hello, everyone. I'm not entirely sure where to start, or exactly how to say it, but here goes.

I only stumbled across Less Wrong this year, after reading HPMOR (I'm sure you get this all the time). Since then, I have gone from an evangelical Christian to a passionate rationalist with an insatiable hunger for challenging what I think I know. It helps that I already had a rationalist foundation, having originally started my adulthood as an atheist.

My training is in IT, but nowhere near enough to help with AI research. I am also quite intelligent, but not enough to open my own rationality dojo. Instead, I am channeling my extroverted nature to help spread the influence of rationality as far and passionately as I can. I am currently spearheading the Kansas City LW/SSC group, and plan to also begin practicing Street Epistemology.

At the risk of sounding like I am trying to garner empathy, I feel rather intimidated by the conversations that are had here; so my posting and commenting will be limited if not entirely non-existent. Please don't ever be discouraged by my silence. You may count yourselves among my friends.
# EA Funds: Long-Term Future fund is open to applications until November 24th (this Saturday)

I am one of the Fund Managers for the Long-Term Future fund and we are doing a very short round of applications to help donors get a sense of what projects we are likely to fund before giving season:

> Have an x-risk or far-future focused project you’ve been thinking about, but don’t have funding for? The CEA Long-Term Future Fund is accepting applications until **this Saturday (11/24)** at this form:

> [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf46ZTOIlv6puMxkEGm6G1FADe5w5fCO3ro-RK6xFJWt7SfaQ/viewform](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf46ZTOIlv6puMxkEGm6G1FADe5w5fCO3ro-RK6xFJWt7SfaQ/viewform)

> This round of applications has a much shorter deadline than usual, to give the Fund’s new management team a chance to make some grants to help donors get a sense of what kinds of projects we are likely to fund before the end of the giving season in December. Future rounds will have longer timelines, and the Fund may invite applicants from this round to re-submit in future rounds.

> In other words: if you can’t hit this deadline, no need to worry - we know it’s very tight! Just keep an eye out for future rounds.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. I will be happy to answer any that I know the answer to (and will ping other fund managers if they seem better suited to answer a question).

Some more context from the form:

  

> For this round and this form, we are particularly interested in small teams and individuals that are trying to get projects off the ground, or that need less money than existing grant-making institutions are likely to give out (i.e. less than ~$40k). Here are a few examples of project types that we're open to funding an individual or group for (note that this list is not exhaustive):

> \+ To spend a few months (perhaps during the summer) to research an open problem in AI alignment or AI strategy and produce a few blog posts or videos on their ideas  
> \+ To spend a few months building a web app with the potential to solve an operations bottleneck at x-risk organisations  
> \+ To spend a few months up-skilling in a field to prepare for future work (e.g. microeconomics, functional programming, etc).  
> \+ To spend a year testing an idea that has the potential to be built into an org.

> You can find more details on the kind of project we are likely to fund on the fund page: [https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future&sa=D&ust=1542775331850000&usg=AFQjCNHHxU7yoqZ1AO4tV06Q1rTNCGp-MQ)
# Suggestion: New material shouldn't be released too fast

Three sequences on AI Safety were recently released. I'd suggest that in general it is probably better when new material isn't released that fast. Those sequences are quite technical so each post requires a reasonable amount of time to be invested. This means:

*   There is more psychological pressure to read each post quickly rather than taking the time to understand and internalise the ideas
*   There are less comments because keeping up with the posts reduces the time people have to write comments and if you're behind, by the time you catch up there's less value writing a comment as less people will see it

This isn't a particularly important post, just feedback for the future.
# The Semantic Man

Irving Lee discusses the goals of General Semantics, one of the historical movements that underlies intellectual currents expressed here now on LessWrong.

>I want to speak very briefly to you. There is one small notion that I should like to talk about rather briefly. It was in 1946, I remember almost the time of year. I had just taken off that Air Force uniform and had managed to persuade Alfred Korzybski to let me pose some questions to him. I had a number of things that bothered me. I had read that “blue peril” and there were paragraphs in it that made no sense even after the fifteenth reading, and I wanted the opportunity to confront him with these paragraphs. I wanted to say: “Now, Alfred, what did you mean when you said this?” And he very kindly agreed to submit to some such questioning, over a period of several afternoons, and I think Miss Kendig may remember some of them. And at one of these sessions, I said, “Now, Alfred, you have been thinking about this stuff for a very long time. Can you tell me, in a nutshell, what are you trying to do? What is the objective of all this reading and studying and talking and sweating that you go through day after day, year after year? What are you after?” And, you know, I never could call on him in those sessions without being forced to take notes. If I came without a pencil and paper, he invariably found a pad and pencil, and “take some notes” was the continuous refrain. Well, I have gone over those notes many times and in answer to that question, this is almost a verbatim account of what he said when I asked him, “Alfred, what are you trying to do, in a nutshell?”
# Speculative Evopsych, Ep. 1

(cw death, religion, suicide, evolutionary psychology, shameless tongue-in-cheek meta-contrarianism)

I have a passing interest in biology, so I recently bought some fruit flies to run experiments on. I did two things to them. First, I bred them for intelligence. The details are kinda boring, so let’s fast-forward: after a few tens of millions of generations, they were respectably intelligent, with language and culture and technology so on.

In parallel with that, and more interestingly, whenever a fly was about to die of injury, I immediately plucked it out of the box, healed it, and put it in a _different_ box (“Box Two”), a magnificent paradise where it blissfully lived out the rest of its days. Evolutionarily, of course, relocation was equivalent to death, and so the flies evolved to treat them the same: you could still make somebody stop affecting your world by stabbing them, and their kin would still grieve and seek revenge – the only difference was the lack of a corpse.

It didn’t really matter that the two boxes were separated only by a pane of glass, and that the flies in Box One could clearly see their “deceased” fellows living fantastic lives in Box Two. They “knew” on an abstract, intellectual level that getting “fatally” wounded wouldn’t actually make them stop having conscious experiences like death would. But _evolution doesn’t care about that distinction_; so it doesn’t select for organisms that care about that distinction; so the flies generally disregarded Box Two.

A small subculture in Box One claimed that “if anybody _actually_ believed in Box Two and all its wonders, they’d stab themself through the heart in order to get there faster. Everybody’s literally-mortal fear of relocation proves that they don’t _truly_ believe in Box Two, they only – at best – _believe_ they believe.”

Strangely, nobody found this argument convincing.
# LW Update 2018-11-22 – Abridged Comments

Haven't posted an update in a while. We've been working on a mixture of bug fixes, small features to support the new AI Alignment Forum, as well as some longer-term, larger features that aren't quite ready yet.

Abridged Comments
-----------------

The biggest change that should be visible to most users is our new Comment Abridging system. For posts with lots of comments, by default it now truncates them to make it easier to skim the thread. Clicking anywhere on a comment thread will expand all the comments below that point (so it's fairly easy to switch from "skim the thread" to "reading it in detail.")

We're fine tuning the exact details, but the current setup is:

*   Comments are abridged-by-default if the post has 25 or more comments. (See the thread from [Realism About Rationality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/suxvE2ddnYMPJN9HD/realism-about-rationality#comments) for a good example)
*   If a comment has more than 20 karma, it's given a higher character count in the abridging. (i.e. instead of cutting it down to 300 characters, it's cut down to 1000 characters). The idea is that if a newcomer arrives at a large thread, they can quickly get an overview of the discussion, with some sense of which parts of the discussion were most interesting, rather than automatically having their attention directed to whichever discussion was responding to the top-ranked top-level comment.
*   For right now, you can expand a given subthread by clicking on a comment node. We're thinking about ways to make it intuitive to expand all comments but hadn't quite solved the UI for that. (We're thinking of making it so that typing "command-F" automatically expands everything, so that if you're searching for a particular comment via a snippet of text the abridging quickly gets out of your way.)
# On MIRI's new research directions

Nate Soares has written up a post that discusses MIRI's new research directions: a mix of reasons why we're pursuing them, reasons why we're pursuing them the way we are, and high-level comparisons to Agent Foundations.

Read the full (long!) post [here](https://intelligence.org/2018/11/22/2018-update-our-new-research-directions/).
# Approval-directed bootstrapping

Approval-directed behavior works best when the overseer is very smart. Where can we find a smart overseer?

One approach is _bootstrapping_. By thinking for a long time, a weak agent can oversee an agent (slightly) smarter than itself. Now we have a slightly smarter agent, who can oversee an agent which is (slightly) smarter still. This process can go on, until the intelligence of the resulting agent is limited by technology rather than by the capability of the overseer. At this point we have reached the limits of our technology.

This may sound exotic, but we can implement it in a surprisingly straightforward way.

Suppose that we evaluate Hugh’s approval by predicting what Hugh would say if we asked him; the rating of action _a_ is what Hugh would say if, instead of taking action _a,_ we asked Hugh, “How do you rate action _a_?”

Now we get bootstrapping almost for free. In the process of evaluating a proposed action, Hugh can consult Arthur. This new instance of Arthur will, in turn, be overseen by Hugh—and in this new role Hugh can, in turn, be assisted by Arthur. In principle we have defined the entire infinite regress before Arthur takes his first action.

We can even learn this function by examples — no elaborate definitions necessary. Each time Arthur proposes an action, we actually ask Hugh to evaluate the action with some probability, and we use our observations to train a model for Hugh’s judgments.

In practice, Arthur might not be such a useful assistant until he has acquired some training data. As Arthur acquires training data, the Hugh+Arthur system becomes more intelligent, and so Arthur acquires training data from a more intelligent overseer. The bootstrapping unfolds over time as Arthur adjusts to increasingly powerful overseers.

* * *

_This was originally posted [here](https://ai-alignment.com/approval-directed-bootstrapping-5d49e886c14f) on 21st December 2014._

_Tomorrow's AI Alignment Forum sequences will take a break, and tomorrow's post will be Issue #34 of the Alignment Newsletter._

_The next post in this sequence is 'Humans consulting HCH', also released today._
# Humans Consulting HCH

_(See also:_ _[strong HCH](https://medium.com/ai-control/strong-hch-bedb0dc08d4e).)_

Consider a human Hugh who has access to a question-answering machine. Suppose the machine answers question Q by perfectly imitating how Hugh would answer question Q, _if_ _Hugh had access to the question-answering machine_.

That is, Hugh is able to consult a copy of Hugh, who is able to consult a copy of Hugh, who is able to consult a copy of Hugh…

Let’s call this process HCH, for “Humans Consulting HCH.”

I’ve talked about many variants of [this process](https://medium.com/ai-control/implementing-our-considered-judgment-6c715a239b3e) before, but I find it easier to think about with a nice handle. (Credit to Eliezer for proposing using a recursive acronym.)

HCH is easy to specify very precisely. For now, I think that HCH is our best way to precisely specify “a human’s enlightened judgment.” It’s got plenty of problems, but for now I don’t know anything better.

Elaborations
------------

We can define realizable variants of this inaccessible ideal:

*   For a particular prediction algorithm P, define HCHᴾ as:  
    “P’s prediction of what a human would say after consulting HCHᴾ”
*   For a reinforcement learning algorithm A, define max-HCHᴬ as:  
    “A’s output when [maximizing the evaluation](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03741) of a human after consulting max-HCHᴬ”
*   For a given market structure and participants, define HCHᵐᵃʳᵏᵉᵗ as:  
    “the market’s prediction of what a human will say after consulting HCHᵐᵃʳᵏᵉᵗ”

Note that e.g. HCHᴾ is totally different from “P’s prediction of HCH.” HCHᴾ will generally make worse predictions, but it is easier to implement.

Hope
----

The best case is that HCHᴾ, max-HCHᴬ, and HCHᵐᵃʳᵏᵉᵗ are:

*   As capable as the underlying predictor, reinforcement learner, or market participants.
*   Aligned with the enlightened judgment of the human, e.g. as evaluated by HCH.

(At least when the human is suitably prudent and wise.)

It is clear from the definitions that these systems can’t be any _more_ capable than the underlying predictor/learner/market. I honestly don’t know whether we should expect them to match the underlying capabilities. My intuition is that max-HCHᴬ probably can, but that HCHᴾ and HCHᵐᵃʳᵏᵉᵗ probably can’t.

It is similarly unclear whether the system continues to reflect the human’s judgment. In some sense this is in tension with the desire to be capable — the more guarded the human, the less capable the system but the more likely it is to reflect their interests. The question is whether a prudent human can achieve both goals.

* * *

This was originally posted [here](https://ai-alignment.com/humans-consulting-hch-f893f6051455#.2xch3cicm) on 29th January 2016.

_Tomorrow's AI Alignment Forum sequences will take a break, and tomorrow's post will be Issue #34 of the Alignment Newsletter._

_The next post in this sequence is 'Corrigibility' by Paul Christiano, which will be published on Tuesday 27th November._
# Winter Solstice 2018 Roundup

Many LessWrong communities are holding Winter Solstice holiday events. What exactly that entails varies from community-to-community, but often includes:

*   A ceremony commemorating humanity's progress over the millenia (often involving speeches and singalong songs)
*   Meetups and parties coinciding with said ceremony, providing a natural time for many people to travel for a larger-than-usual rationalist gathering.

If you're hosting such an event, this is a good post to comment on linking to whatever event-pages you have set up to collect RSVPs or tickets/donations.

It's helpful reserving a spot ASAP (as well as donating to help pay for the cost of the venue), so that the organizers can plan better. Many events have a pay-what-you-can scheme, with newcomers or people without much spare cash encouraged to donate around $15, and more well-to-do community members can help subsidize the event for others.

Events So Far
=============

US East Coast Megameetup
------------------------

_December 15th –_ New York City is hosting their annual Solstice + Megameetup. Travelers are welcome all weekend long to stay at a large house being rented for the occasion. The ceremony itself is will be Saturday evening.

*   [RSVP for the Megameetup](https://rationalistmegameetup.com/) (either for visiting during-the-day-activities, or reserving space to sleep overnight)
*   [RSVP for the ceremony on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/events/712346582470974/)
*   [Pay-What-You-Can](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nyc-secular-solstice-2018-tickets-52727917621) on Eventbrite to help support the ceremony

Bay Area
--------

_December 9th –_ The San Francisco Bay Area is holding their solstice event at a planetarium in Oakland. There should be a sufficient number of seats, but seating _is_ finite, so please get an [official ticket on Eventbrite](https://tinyurl.com/baysolstice2018) to confirm there is still space.

*   [RSVP on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/events/321764165221337/?ref=br_rs)
*   [Pay-what-you-can on Eventbrite](https://tinyurl.com/baysolstice2018)

Boston
------

December 21st – A smaller, more intimate event, Boston wins the "actually celebrating Solstice on Solstice" award.

*   [RSVP on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/events/177150809894419/)

Seattle
-------

December 22nd – Honorable mention for "almost on actual Solstice."

*   [RSVP on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/events/474201209737926/)
*   [Pay-what-you-can on Eventbrite](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/seattle-secular-solstice-2018-tickets-47498714935?fbclid=IwAR3aTOlUBFNCdpaJVxRREgpP_v9qH_88kfYi9-QYOZPImOJ6rpDzEvU08r8)

* * *

I believe there are Solstices in the works in the UK and Germany but do not know many details about them. If you're running one, please comment!
# Genetically Modified Humans Born (Allegedly)

I realize normally we don't talk about the news or hot-button issues, but this is of sufficiently high importance I am posting anyway.

There is a link from Nature News on Monday [here](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07545-0). There is a link from MIT Technology Review discussing the documents uploaded by the team behind the effort [here](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612458/exclusive-chinese-scientists-are-creating-crispr-babies/amp/?__twitter_impression=true).

Summarizing the report I heard on the radio this morning:

*   The lead scientist is He Jiankui, with a team at Southern University of Science and Technology, in Shenzhen.
*   7 couples in the experiment, each with HIV+ fathers and HIV- mothers.
*   CRISPR was used to genetically edit embryos to eliminate the CCR5 gene, providing HIV resistance.
*   Allegedly twin girls have been born with these edits.

I don't think DNA testing of the twins has taken place yet. If anyone has a line on good, nuanced sources, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
# Counterintuitive Comparative Advantage

This has been sitting in my drafts folder since 2011. Decided to post it today given the [recent post about Dunning—Kruger](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qS2dnpeQyppetgXqv/double-dipping-in-dunning-kruger) and related discussions.

The standard rationalist answer when someone asks for career advice  is "find your comparative advantage." I don't have any really good  suggestions about how to make this easier, but it seems like a good  topic to bring up for discussion.

If 15 years ago (when I was still in college and my initial career choice hadn't been finalized yet), someone told me that perhaps I ought to consider a career in philosophy, I would have laughed. "You must be joking. *Obviously*, I'll be really bad at doing philosophy," I would have answered. I thought of myself as a natural born programmer, and that's the career direction I ended up choosing.

As it turns out, I am a pretty good programmer, and a terrible philosopher, but it also happens to be the case that just about everyone else is even *worse* at doing philosophy, and getting some philosophical questions right might be *really* important.

The usual (instinctive) way for someone to choose a career is probably to pick a field that they think they will be particularly good at, using a single standard of goodness across all of the candidate fields. For example, the implicit reasoning behind my own career choice could be something like "Given a typical programming problem, I can solve it in a few hours with high probability. Whereas, given a typical philosophical problem, I can at best solve it after many years with low probability."

On the other hand, comparative advantage says that in addition to your own abilities, you should also consider how good other people are (or will be) at various fields, and how valuable the outputs of those fields are (will be). Unless you're only interested in maximizing income, and the fields you're considering are likely to remain stable over your lifetime (in which case you can just compare current salaries, although apparently many people don't even do that), this can be pretty tricky.

(There doesn't appear to be any previous OB/LW posts on comparative advantage. The closest I could find is Eliezer's [Money: The Unit of Caring](/lw/65/money_the_unit_of_caring/). Most discussions elsewhere seem to focus on simple static examples where finding comparative advantage is relatively trivial.)

Today (in 2018) there's an [80,000 Hour article](https://80000hours.org/articles/comparative-advantage/) about comparative advantage but that is more about how to find one's comparative advantage in a community of people who share a cause, like in EA, rather in the wider economy.

I would also add (in 2018) that besides everyone else lacking skill or talent at something, an even bigger source of comparative advantage is being one of the first people to realize that a problem is a problem, or to realize an important new variant or subproblem of an existing problem. In that case, everyone else is really bad at solving that problem just because they have no idea the problem even exists.
# Madison Solstice Gathering

Some far-flung rationalists will be in Madison for the holidays and want to bring secular solstice to Wisconsin! It will be a potluck, so bring something to share if you can. We'll eat food and sing some 'traditional' songs (lyrics will be sent out beforehand) and maybe go outside for a bit; I'm not sure, it's not totally planned yet.

Location will by default be my parents' house, which is near St. Mary's Hospital, but if you have a big living room you'd like to volunteer for this purpose I am super open to changing locations. I think at least one person is driving up from Chicago; if you're interested you can coordinate with them on the Chicago Rationality Facebook group.

See [this document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-iRkY8MBXZPIneHd_LFsfhgSF-jwhRfRuOaru5WpRV8/edit) for additional logistics (including exact location), as well as music and lyrics!
# Moving Factward

In the legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien, the land of the gods is known as "The Uttermost West." For the world was originally created flat, and the gods took the westernmost region of this flat world for their dwelling place.  
  
On our globe, of course, there is no westernmost point. And yet it is still the case that, at each position on the equator, some direction is objectively "westward". The objectivity of "westward" doesn't assume that there is some ultimate West by which the west-ness of all other positions is measured.  
  
Analogously, there is no such thing as a "bare uninterpreted fact". "Just the facts" is not a realizable ideal.  
  
And yet we can still recognize when one account of a situation is more "factish" than another. We can see that the second account is more of an interpretation compared to the relatively factish features given in the first account. The more-factish account is never the ultimate and unvarnished truth. Likely no coherent sense could be made of that ideal. Nonetheless, from wherever we stand, we can always "move factward".\[1\]

* * *

Footnote
--------

\[1\] **ETA**: [Said Achmiz](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wX26kvBTRNATwaYCY/moving-factward#45x6nyrT6pyg4CX2x) points out that many features of "westward" don't apply to "factward". Analogies typically assert a similarity between only some, not all, aspects of the two analogous situations. But maybe the other aspects of "westward" are so salient that they interfere with the analogy.
# Anyone use the "read time" on Post Items?

Someone recently mentioned that they found the "read time" on home page post-items to be more of annoying clutter than a helpful indicator of whether to read something.

It occurred to me that I don't personally use them, and in general it's important for each UI element to be pulling it's weight. I'm curious how many people actively like/use them?

\[Update: enough people have chimed in that I'm reasonably confident it's a good feature to have\]
# Open and Welcome Thread December 2018

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes 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).

* * *

As well as trying out combining welcome threads and open threads, I thought I'd try highlighting some frontpage comments I found especially insightful in the last month, for further discussion:

*   Scott Garrabrant wrote a [comment](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p7x32SEt43ZMC9r7r/embedded-agents#b23WPjbNtijsawDpC) on how Embedded Agency and Agent Foundations research are like science in relation to ML approaches to AI alignment which are more like engineering. The comment helped me think about how I go about formalising and solving problems more generally.
*   Rohin Shah wrote a [comment](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZeE7EKHTFMBs8eMxn/clarifying-ai-alignment#3ECKoYzFNW2ZqS6km) on basic definitions of the alignment problem, contrasting a motivation-competence split versus a definition-optimization split. (It is then followed by a convo on definitions between Paul and Wei which gets pretty deep into the weeds - I'd love to read a summary here from anyone else who followed along.)
# Worth keeping

_(Epistemic status: quick speculation which matches my intuitions about how social things go, but which I hadn’t explicitly described before, and haven’t checked.)_

If your car gets damaged, should you invest more or less in it going forward? It could go either way. The car needs more investment to be in good condition, so maybe you do that. But the car is worse than you thought, so maybe you start considering a new car, or putting your dollars into Uber instead.

If you are writing an essay and run into difficulty describing something, you can put in additional effort to find the right words, or you can suspect that this is not going to be a great essay, and either give up, or prepare to get it out quickly and imperfectly, worrying less about the other parts that don’t quite work.

When something has a problem, you always choose whether to double down with it or to back away.

(Or in the middle, to do a bit of both: to fix the car this time, but start to look around for other cars.)

I’m interested in this as it pertains to people. When a friend fails, do you move toward them—to hold them, talk to them, pick them up at your own expense—or do you edge away? It probably depends on the friend (and the problem). If someone embarrasses themselves in public, do you sully your own reputation to stand up for their worth? Or do you silently hope not to be associated with them? If they are dying, do you hold their hand, even if it destroys you? Or do you hope that someone else is doing that, and become someone they know less well?

Where a person fits on this line would seem to radically change their incentives around you. Someone firmly in your ‘worth keeping’ zone does better to let you see their problems than to hide them. Because you probably won’t give up on them, and you might help. Since everyone has problems, and they take effort to hide, this person is just a lot freer around you. If instead every problem hastens a person’s replacement, they should probably not only hide their problems, but also many of their other details, which are somehow entwined with problems.

(A related question is when you should let people know where they stand with you. _Prima facie_, it seems good to make sure people know when they are safe. But that means it also being clearer when a person is not safe, which has downsides.)

If there are better replacements in general, then you will be inclined to replace things more readily. If you can press a button to have a great new car appear, then you won’t have the same car for long.

The social analog is that in a community where friends are more replaceable—for instance, because everyone is extremely well selected to be similar on important axes—it should be harder to be close to anyone, or to feel safe and accepted. Even while everyone is unusually much on the same team, and unusually well suited to one another.
# Is cognitive load a factor in community decline?

This is speculation; I had the thought and then ran in to trouble disentangling the question I am trying to answer from other research on a different question, and also the sources I know about are not conveniently available to me. Ideally I can either get a swift negation or a line on the right kind of research to look at from here.

From [here](https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/) I get the notion that more effort is required per hour of work than was the case in the past. It's very long, but here's the part that piqued my interest:

> So labour productivity growth in textiles came from a combination of “speed-up” and “stretch-out”, which is equivalent to “labour intensification” — making each worker exert more e_ffort_ for every hour of work.

> Clark (1[987)](https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v47y1987i01p141-173_04.html) notes that over the course of the 19th century the average Lancashire operative roughly doubled the number of machines tended, even as the speed of machines also increased. This higher workload makes it “unsafe to infer that the increase in output per worker resulted solely from technical progress”.

> That view is powerfully supported by Bessen (2[012)](https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v72y2012i01p44-74_00.html), who estimates approximately 1/4 of the 50-fold increase in cloth output per worker-hour between 1800 and 1900 was due to each weaver simply operating more looms than they had done initially. That’s r_eally big._ But if you cut off the initial quantum leap from the h_and_ loom (1800) to the power loom (1819) and consider only the mechanised era after 1819, the share of  the productivity growth due to greater exertion of effort is even bigger _—_ **more than 60%** !

From this [Kathy Sierra](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKTxC9pl-WM) talk I saw some months ago, I get the notion of total cognitive resources used during work. Combining these two suggests to me that the total cognitive resources used on the job have increased over time.

Finally I have been wondering about the decline of community in the United States these last few weeks. Referring to [Putnam](http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/assoc/strange.html), it seems this has been pretty consistent since ~1965.

So what I am wondering is: did we cross some threshold around 1965 where the demands of work ate up the all cognitive resources we had available, so none were left for working in/on our community?

In pseudoerasmus' post the term "labor intensification" is used, but when I search for variations on labor intensity/ification, mostly what I get is the ratio of labor expenditures to capital expenditures. I also don't have access to Benson's paper, and while I am prepared to go around that lack of access I wanted to see if there was a publicly available body of work to check first.
# Is the human brain a valid choice for the Universal Turing Machine in Solomonoff Induction?

I've recently been thinking about Solomonoff induction, and in particular the [free choice of Universal Turing Machine](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fC248GwrWLT4Dkjf6/open-problems-related-to-solomonoff-induction).

One variable that seems like a potential choice here is a human brain (my brain for example). It's obviously a bit of a weird choice, but I don't see any reason to disprefer it over a Python interpreter, given that the whole point of Solomonoff induction is to define a prior and so my knowledge of physics or atoms shouldn't really come into play when choosing a UTM.

Concretely, the UTM would be a human simulated in an empty room with an infinitely large notebook symbolizing the tape. It's output would be an encoding of sensory data, and it's input would be a string of instructions in english.

If we do that, then the sentence ["the woman at the end of the street is a witch, she did it"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor) suddenly becomes one of the simplest hypotheses that are available to us. Since the english sentence is so short, we now basically just need to give an encoding of who that woman is and what the action in question is, which is probably also going to be a lot shorter in human language than machine language (since our UTM already understands basic physics, society, etc.), and then our simulated human (which since Solomonoff induction doesn't have runtime constraints can take as much time as they want) should be able to produce a prediction of historical sensory input quite well, with relatively little input.

I feel like I must be missing something in my understanding of Solomonoff induction. I have a lot more thoughts, but maybe someone else has already thought of this and can help me understand this. Some thoughts that come to mind:

*   I don't know how to build a human brain, but I know how to build a machine that runs a Python interpreter. In that sense I understand a Python interpreter a lot better than I do a human brain, and using it as the basis of Solomonoff induction is more enlightening
*   There is a weird circularity about choosing a human brain (or your own brain in particular) as the UTC in Solomonoff induction that I can't quite put my finger on
*   Maybe I am misunderstanding the Solomonoff induction formalism so that this whole construction doesn't make any sense
# What is "Social Reality?"

Eliezer's sequences [touch upon this concept](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CEGnJBHmkcwPTysb7/lonely-dissent) but I'm not sure they actually use the phrase. Much of my understanding of it came from in-person conversations. Various comments and posts have discussed it but to my knowledge there isn't a clear online writeup.
# LW Update 2018-12-06 – All Posts Page, Questions Page, Posts Item rework

First, an FYI – the LessWrong Team will be starting various holiday trips fairly soon. We'll probably still be doing some work and answering intercom, but may be more delayed than usual over the next few weeks.

But, we also have a few more updates:

*   There is now a [questions page](https://www.lesswrong.com/questions), if you'd like to just view the latest question posts. (this uses a new backend view called "questions" for those interested in playing around with the API)
*   There is now a bare-bones [All Posts page](https://www.lesswrong.com/allPosts). We'll probably give it more features (i.e. sorting, filtering) at some point. For now it just loads the most recent 100 posts in chronological order. It doesn't have all the anti-spam filters that we've added to other sections yet, so, um, watch out for that I guess.
*   Post Items have been reworked a bit so it's easier to skim them for karma (while still trying to avoid making karma _too_ visible). Also added some tooltips for vote-counts, alignment forum and word-count.
# What precisely do we mean by AI alignment?

We sometimes phrase AI alignment as the problem of aligning the behavior or values of AI with what humanity wants or humanity's values or humanity's intent, but this leaves open the questions of just what precisely it means for an AI to be "aligned" with just what precisely we mean by "wants," "values," or "intent". So when we say we want to build aligned AI, what precisely do we mean to accomplish beyond vaguely building an AI that does-what-I-mean-not-what-I-say?
# Measly Meditation Measurements

  

\-\-\-\-\-\-

Go/NoGo
-------

texttt?
-------

  
Before Meditation:  
367.733 ± 12.741  
470.411 ± 18.322  
507.999 ± 22.610  
  
After Meditation:  
533.515 ± 22.971  
489.971 ± 28.985  
454.545 ± 26.831  
  
\## CuedAttention:  
  
Before Meditation:  
564.482 ± 19.791  
605.753 ± 20.142  
601.675 ± 19.817  
  
After Meditation:  
589.934 ± 20.131  
559.566 ± 19.943  
624.020 ± 19.829  
  
\## PVT  
  
Before Meditation:  
\-\-\-\-  
342ms  
343ms  
  
After Meditation:  
339ms  
342ms  
330ms
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Why should EA care about rationality (and vice-versa)?

There's a lot of overlap between the effective altruism movement and the LessWrong rationality movement in terms of their membership, but each also has many people who are part of one group and not the other. For those in the overlap, why should EA care about rationality and rationality care about EA?
# Boston Secular Solstice

I previously made a [LessWrong Post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ERboWueanAyqwKbiQ/boston-solstice-2018) but since it wasn't an event I'm also making an event entry.

If you can [RSVP on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/events/177150809894419/) or email me (jeff@jefftk.com) if you're coming it will be easier to have the right amount of seating.
# Who's welcome to our LessWrong meetups?

  

As part of announcing meetups publically, it's good to write in the meetup description about what kind of people would likely be a good match for the meetup. I still haven't gotten a good description myself.

How would you describe the kind of people we are in words that are clear to outsiders?