Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# How do you Murphyjitsu essentially risky activities?

In the [CFAR Handbook](https://rationality.org/files/cfar-handbook.pdf) they have the following process instructions for Murphyjitsu:

> 1. Select a goal. A habit you want to install, or a plan you’d like to execute, or a project you want to complete.
> 2. Outline your plan. Be sure to list next actions, concrete steps, and specific deadlines or benchmarks. It’s important that you can actually visualize yourself moving through your plan, rather than having something vague like work out more.
>3. Surprise-o-meter. It’s been months, and you’ve made little or no progress! Where are you, on the scale from yeah, that sounds right to I literally don’t understand what happened? If you’re completely shocked—good job, your inner sim endorses your plan! If you’re not, though, go to Step 4.
> 4. Pre-hindsight. Try to construct a plausible narrative for what kept you from succeeding. Remember to look at both internal and external factors.
> 5. Bulletproofing. What actions can you take to prevent these hypothetical failure modes? Visualize taking those preemptive actions and then ask your inner sim “What comes next?” Have you successfully defused the danger?
> 6. Iterate steps 3-5. That’s right—it’s not over yet! Even with your new failsafes, your plan still failed. Are you shocked? If so, victory! If not—keep going.

It seems like this process presumes that mitigations are low-cost and that the project you are trying to achieve is fundamentally achievable according to your inner sim. Most of this is presumption is contained in step 3. I've been thinking about how to apply this process to projects in a professional context (rather than a "self-help" context I guess) and in many cases you face costly tradeoffs regarding derisking mitigations. Also, sometimes your project may just be a big bet.

How do you change Murphyjitsu to work in such situations? Also, if people have experiences using Murphyjitsu in projects (e.g. a 1-3 month project involving a small team people), I'd be interested in learning how it's different.
# Half-Baked Products and Idea Kernels

When I ask someone at work for a project proposal, I never want the person to go silent on me and put in 100 hours of solitary work, and then finally show me something and ask for my feedback. I always want to see a **half-baked product**.

![](https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*8vczYs4FG6cGvbcK.jpg)

You can half-bake something in an hour or two, or even in a few minutes.

The advantage of half-baking is that you get a quick feedback loop. The more you think there’s a possibility that I’ll say “no, that’s not what I wanted”, the more half-baked you should make your first effort before getting my feedback.

When brainstorming ideas, my term for a half-baked idea is a **kernel**. A kernel is usually a crappy idea on its own, but there’s “something to it” that could make it the seed of a better idea. I encourage people to toss out kernels.

There are two reasons why operating this way is efficient:

**Diminishing Returns on Time Spent**
=====================================

Say you work on something for 100 hours. While each hour adds value, typically the highest-value hour is the first hour and the lowest-value hour is the last hour, and it follows a curve like this:

![](https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*K49kJVbKPGxfQuknR3dkTg.jpeg)

For example, if you're going to spend 100 hours writing a long report, spending one hour to brain-dump the key bullet points would give a reader a lot more than 1% of the final value of your report. Realistically, it’s probably more like 20%.

So the less time you spend working before getting feedback, the higher your productivity was in that time.

**Efficient Course Correction**
===============================

When you’re starting out on a new project that isn’t well-understood, you’re unlikely to go in the exact right direction. So you don’t want to go too far before getting a course correction, or you’ll waste time.

![](https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*EVbMOCz2ASlAZyjv2-QXuA.jpeg)

The top path shows how most people waste their time by investing too much effort between course corrections. The bottom path shows the efficient approach: you do a small chunk of work, then get feedback from your boss or your customers to correct your course, then do the next small chunk of work.

Once your course corrections become small, you can do larger chunks of work between course corrections. Until then, take small steps that produce half-baked products and idea kernels.
# Does NYT have policies?

Does the New York Times have written policies? Does it publish them? Have they leaked?

[Here](https://www.nytco.com/company/standards-ethics/) is a list of six public documents. Most interesting are the [Ethical Journalism Guidebook/Handbook](https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-journalism.html) and the [Guidelines on \[Our\] Integrity](https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/guidelines-on-integrity.html). The first mentions three documents: (A) "the Newsroom Integrity Statement, promulgated in 1999"; is this the Guidelines linked above? (B) "the Policy on Confidential Sources, issued in 2004," [archived here](https://web.archive.org/web/20070630163134/http://www.nytco.com/company/business_units/sources.html). Do they still publish it? and (C) "the Rules of the Road," which sounds like a private document not specific to journalism.

Are there other private written policies? Have they leaked? Are there rumors about them?

I don't mean to imply that policies are an unalloyed good. At some level of detail or disorganization, people simply don't learn them. I have a largely unjustified intuition that lying is bad and [lying about policies](https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-mbta-has-no-shoes-policy) is particularly bad, seeming to exist to diffuse responsibility.
# Can I archive content from lesswrong.com on the wayback machine (internet archive, archive.org) ?

There are some great information on [lesswrong.com](lesswrong.com) (LW) that seems to be available publicly (I can access it in an incognito chrome window) and I would like to increase the chances of this information surviving for a long time.

When I try saving a LW page it looks like it does not render correctly on the wayback machine. Ex: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200624170623/https://www.lesswrong.com/s/FrqfoG3LJeCZs96Ym/p/8qccXytpkEhEAkjjM](https://web.archive.org/web/20200624170623/https://www.lesswrong.com/s/FrqfoG3LJeCZs96Ym/p/8qccXytpkEhEAkjjM)

I opened a [github issue on LW's repo](https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2/issues/3265) since I assume it is an issue with the source code of LW.
[The EA forum seems to have the same issue](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vK4iAutzMSfamG5je/can-i-archive-the-ea-forum-on-the-wayback-machine-internet) and it looks like the EA forum's repo is a fork of lesswrong's repo. I am also writing here since it might have more visibility for non tech people.
# What's the name for that plausible deniability thing?

There's a concept I remember reading about here, of the idea that you can't just suddenly refuse to answer dangerous questions. You have to consistently refuse to answer some random sample of totally normal questions, so that "refusing to answer a question" doesn't itself become a source of information.

Unfortunately I can't remember what it's usually called, and haven't been able to turn it up via search ("plausible deniability" is way too broad, and I can't find the right narrowing criteria). What is this concept/process called?
# Betting with Mandatory Post-Mortem

Betting money is a useful way to

* ensure you have some skin in the game when making assertions;
* get a painful reminder of when you're wrong, so that you'll update;
* make money off of people, if you're right.

However, I recently made a bet with both a monetary component *and* the stipulation that the loser write at least 500 words to a group chat about why they were wrong. I like this idea because:

* It enforces that some cognitive labor be devoted to the update, rather than relying on the pain of lost cash. Even if you do think it through privately, the work of writing it up will help you remember the mistake next time. (If you don't want to spend that amount of time thinking about why you were wrong, then perhaps you aren't very interested in really updating on this bet.)
* People usually make small-cash bets anyway, so there's not that much skin in the game. Being forced to write publically, or to a select group of peers such as a slack/discord server, makes it feel real for me in a way that losing a small sum of money doesn't.
* Where normal bets may benefit the participants, these kinds of public bets have more benefit for the whole audience. Observers get a lot more information about the structure of the disagreement, and the update which the loser takes from it.
* Often, by the time a bet is decided, a lot of other relevant information has come in as well. A public post-mortem gives the loser a chance to convey this information.
* This kind of bet will often be positive-sum in reputational terms: the winner gets a public endorsement from the loser, but the loser may gain respect from the audience for their gracious defeat and judicious update.

Furthermore, if the loser's write-up is anything short of honest praise for the winner's views, the write-up may provide hints at a continuing disagreement between the loser and winner which can lead to another bet.

This idea feels similar to Ben's [Share Models, Not Beliefs](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/zucjLBpQ9S9eWPWGu). Bets focus only on disagreement with probabilities, not the underlying reasons for those disagreements. Declaring a winner/loser conveys binary information about who was more correct, but this is very little information. Post-mortems give a place for the models to be brought to light.

A group of people who engaged in betting-with-post-mortems together would generally be getting a lot more feedback on practical reasoning and where it can go wrong.
# DontDoxScottAlexander.com - A Petition

Here's the petition Scott asked us to make.

This is a request for a specific action by the *New York Times* editors: 

> We, the undersigned, urge the *New York Times* to respect Scott Alexander's request to not reveal his real name in a planned piece discussing the Slate Star Codex blog and community.
> 
> \[...\]

That's all. It seems to me really important for public discourse on the internet for journalists to respect this norm in this situation.

Please share it in the places you share things, and email it to the prominent people who you know that the *New York Times* respects and care about.

[Please sign.](https://DontDoxScottAlexander.com)

**Acknowledgements**

Thanks to Rob Bensinger for making the petition with me.

Thanks to Paul Graham, Steven Pinker and many others for their early signatures.

Thanks to Sarah Haider and Tanner Greer for independently organising a petition and then joining forces with ours.

Thanks to so many other people who are still unsubscribing from the NYT, giving them respectful-but-firm feedback, and otherwise supporting Scott in this situation. It's been great to see so much love and support for SSC these past 48 hours.
# There's an Awesome AI Ethics List and it's a little thin

I recently stumbled upon the [Awesome Artificial Intelligence Ethics](https://github.com/marikyu7/awesome-artificial-intelligence-ethics) list, and was somewhat underwhelmed with its quality. While it has enough links to *look* like a good and useful [Awesome List](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome/blob/main/awesome.md), I think I'd come away from it mostly confused and unsure where to go next. Some obvious oversights include:

* The books section is quite short, given the amount of material that's been published in this space since SuperIntelligence.
* LessWrong is in the Blogs section, but the [Effective Altruism](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/) and [AI Alignment](https://www.alignmentforum.org/) Fora are not.
* There are a ton of great introductory-to-in-the-weeds podcasts on AI Ethics topics, but there's no podcasts section (or other section in which podcasts would clearly be appropriate).
* There are number of technical research agenda that would be [![Awesome](https://awesome.re/badge.svg)](https://awesome.re) to list on the off chance anyone happens upon this list and wants to work their way up to the actual state of research.

I'm going to make [some pull requests](https://github.com/marikyu7/awesome-artificial-intelligence-ethics/pulls), but I can only suggest what I know about. [Perhaps you can help?](https://github.com/marikyu7/awesome-artificial-intelligence-ethics)
# Sunday June 28 – talks by johnswentworth, Daniel kokotajlo, Charlie Steiner, TurnTrout

This Sunday at noon (PDT), we're running another session of "lightning talks" by curated LessWrong authors (see [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x46rsCLk6fyAFQsBz/this-sunday-lightning-talks-by-curated-lw-authors) for last weeks announcement and some transcripts).

*   Each talk will be 3-5 minutes followed by discussion. Afterwards, we'll have a hangout in breakout rooms. The talks will be short and focus on presenting one core idea well, rather than rushing through a lot of content.
*   We want to give top LessWrong writers an interesting space to discuss their ideas, and have more fruitful collaboration between users. Think of it like a cross between an academic colloquium and some friends chatting by a whiteboard.

Speakers
--------

*   **johnswentworth** — "Mazes and Duality"
    *   Curated posts: [Gears-Level Models are Capital Investments](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nEBbw2Bc2CnN2RMxy/gears-level-models-are-capital-investments), [Everyday Lessons from High-Dimensional Optimization](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pT48swb8LoPowiAzR/everyday-lessons-from-high-dimensional-optimization), [Interfaces as a Scarce Resource](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hyShz2ABiKX56j5tJ/interfaces-as-a-scarce-resource), ...
*   **Daniel Kokotajlo** — **"**Lessons on AI takeover from the conquistadors"
    *   Curated posts: [Cortés, Pizarro, and Afonso as Precedents for Takeover](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ivpKSjM4D6FbqF4pZ/cortes-pizarro-and-afonso-as-precedents-for-takeover), ...
*   **Charlie Steiner**
    *   Curated post:  [Book Review: Consciousness Explained](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yex7E6oHXYL93Evq6/book-review-consciousness-explained#comments)
*   **TurnTrout** — “Power as easily exploitable opportunities”
    *   Curated posts: [Insights from Euclid's 'Elements'](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wpf3Gsa8A89mmjkk8/insights-from-euclid-s-elements), [Problem relaxation as a tactic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JcpwEKbmNHdwhpq5n/problem-relaxation-as-a-tactic), ...

Details
-------

**When?** Sunday June 28, at noon, Pacific Daylight Time

**Where?** On [this zoom link](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88970027655).
# Why are all these domains called from Less Wrong?

When I visit a Less Wrong page, the browser also attempts to load content from the following domains:

\* algolia.net  
\* algolianet.com  
\* cloudflare.com  
\* cloudinary.com  
\* dl.drop  
\* dropbox.com  
\* dropboxusercontent.com  
\* google.com  
\* googleapis.com  
\* googletagmanager.com  
\* intercom.io  
\* jsdelivr.net  
\* lr-ingest.io  
\* typekit.net

Why is it so? I don't want to advertise to half of internet (and specifically to Google) the fact that I read Less Wrong. What happens if I simply block all these domains? What service do they provide if I don't block them?
# Somerville Mask Usage

Two months ago, Somerville [made facecoverings mandatory](https://www.somervillema.gov/news/somerville-requires-mask-or-face-covering-all-indoor-and-outdoor-public-spaces), both indoors and out. A few weeks later the state of Massachusetts required them " [in public places where social distancing is not possible](https://www.mass.gov/news/wear-a-mask-in-public)". A week ago Somerville [reduced its requirements](https://www.somervillema.gov/summer2020) in light of the heat: "during the summer months, when you are outside and able to social distance at least six feet from others, you may temporarily remove your face covering but must put it back on when others are nearby."

I was curious what people were actually doing, so while Anna was playing in the "woods" along the edge of the bike path, I gathered some statistics. As each person passed along the path, I tracked mode of transportation (walk, run, bike, scooter/skateboard), apparent gender (female, male, child, unclear), and face covering status (covered, mouth only, removed, absent). Raw data is [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W-YcRCB12t5FikfjRZ2o3dcwc5ln50NZCVQdQEJDp9M/edit).

In forty minutes on June 28th, from 9:41am to 10:21am I saw 179 people pass. Of these, 73% (131) were masked, 5% (9) had their nose exposed, 15% (27) had masks on their chin or otherwise removed, and 7% (12) had no mask at all:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/overall-masking-status.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/overall-masking-status-big.png)

With a person passing every 13 seconds, the path was a pretty crowded place. I only very rarely saw people putting on their masks, however, when coming close to others. For the analysis below I want to talk about people as being masked or not, and people with masks removed wouldn't qualify. Masks worn mouth-only are less clear, but since a large fraction of transmission seems to be via talking and coughing, I decided to count someone as masked if their mouth was covered, even if their nose was sticking out.

When looking at people by transportation, walkers (74%, 62/84) were a bit less likely to be masked than others (82%, 78/95), but not by much:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/somerville-masking-status-by-transport.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/somerville-masking-status-by-transport-big.png)

Looking by gender/age, women were less likely to be masked (72%, 56/78) than men (85%, 74/87). \[1\] Children were in between (77%, 10/13), though I didn't count children in bicycle trailers or strollers:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/somerville-masking-status-by-gender-age.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/somerville-masking-status-by-gender-age-big.png)

I'm curious what numbers look like in other areas. Talking impressions with friends, it sounds like this is a higher fraction of people wearing masks than in most places?

  
\[1\] I categorized people by apparent gender, and one person didn't read immediately as male or female.
# How ought I spend time? 

What factors go into your reasoning about assigning relative weights to 
1. grinding through books
2. projects, taking a shot at the possibility of a contribution
3. reading current research 

Personally, I never maintain 1 and 2 at the same time, and I tend to have >95% of my resources on either one or the other, leaving 5% or less for 3. The vast majority of the last 4 years I've been in 1-mode, my reasoning being that I can't make a contribution if I don't know anything, and I don't want to sink my time into bad projects.
# AvE: Assistance via Empowerment

This might be relevant to the AI safety crowd. Key quote:

"Our key insight is that agents can assist humans without inferring their goals or limiting their autonomy by instead increasing the human’s controllability of their environment – in other words, their ability to affect the environment through actions. We capture this via empowerment, an information-theoretic quantity that is a measure of the controllability of a state through calculating the logarithm of the number of possible distinguishable future states that are reachable from the initial state [41]. In our method, Assistance via Empowerment (AvE), we formalize the learning of assistive agents as an augmentation of reinforcement learning with a measure of human empowerment. The intuition behind our method is that by prioritizing agent actions that increase the human’s empowerment, we are enabling the human to more easily reach whichever goal they want. Thus, we are assisting the human without information about their goal[...]**Without any information or prior assumptions about the human’s goals or intentions, our agents can still learn to assist humans.**"[Emphasis and omissions are mine]

From the abstract: One difficulty in using artificial agents for human-assistive applications lies in the challenge of accurately assisting with a person's goal(s). Existing methods tend to rely on inferring the human's goal, which is challenging when there are many potential goals or when the set of candidate goals is difficult to identify. We propose a new paradigm for assistance by instead increasing the human's ability to control their environment, and formalize this approach by augmenting reinforcement learning with human empowerment. This task-agnostic objective preserves the person's autonomy and ability to achieve any eventual state. We test our approach against assistance based on goal inference, highlighting scenarios where our method overcomes failure modes stemming from goal ambiguity or misspecification. As existing methods for estimating empowerment in continuous domains are computationally hard, precluding its use in real time learned assistance, we also propose an efficient empowerment-inspired proxy metric. Using this, we are able to successfully demonstrate our method in a shared autonomy user study for a challenging simulated teleoperation task with human-in-the-loop training.

How does this fit in with [other control problem approaches](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eXNy48LxxfgETdtYB/comparing-ai-alignment-approaches-to-minimize-false-positive)? What is the relationship between this and [Turner's power formalism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6DuJxY8X45Sco4bS2/seeking-power-is-instrumentally-convergent-in-mdps)?

They also carried out a survey that didn't look like it made it into the paper, but shows up on the project web page: https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/ave/home
# Inviting Curated Authors to Give 5-Min Online Talks

If you've written a post that's been curated by the LessWrong team, then you're eligible to give a talk at one of our upcoming weekend events. If you'd like to give one, [**here's the form to fill out your availability.**](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScDny3m7G2YofRfSJaKVios2wzfVmz6xznRnJDZ7nVsiOR9Bw/viewform)

The events looks something like this:

*   20-40 LessWrong users show up.
*   3-5 curated authors give 5 minute talks over zoom
*   After each talk, we have 5-10 mins of Q&A from the attendees.
*   After the talks (which last ~1 hour), we split into breakout rooms for a 30-60 min hangout and discuss the ideas.
*   After the event, Ben and Jacob make transcripts of the talks and publish them.

Speakers so far have been Vaniver, TurnTrout, Abram Demski, John Wentworth, Eukaryote, Othonormal, Charlie Steiner, Alkjash, Daniel Kokotajlo. 

Examples of transcripts: [Alkjash](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAvGi9YAPZAnnjZNY/prediction-compression-transcript-1), [Abram](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZM63n353vh2ag7z4p/radical-probabilism-transcript).

Your talk can discuss a post, a comment, or a new idea you've not been able to write down yet.

[**Here's the form.**](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScDny3m7G2YofRfSJaKVios2wzfVmz6xznRnJDZ7nVsiOR9Bw/viewform)
# PSA: Cars don't have 'blindspots'

Not once in my life have I gone to drive someone's car and not seen incorrect mirror setup. [Infographic here](https://imgur.com/a/8S8sAln).

With correct adjustment, as cars leave your rear view mirror they enter your side view, and as they exit your side view they enter your peripheral vision. You still need to move your head to check for motorcycles and for maintaining situational awareness, but properly adjusted mirrors drastically reduces being surprised.
# Harry Potter and methods of rationality alternative ending.

**\*Spoiler Alert\***

**As it is clear from the title, following text deals with the plot of the book. I strongly recommend to anyone no familiar with the subject to read the book first and form a personal opinion. Also, I will be glad to see in the discussion anyone who were directly involved in creation of this artwork.**

First of all, I want to thank the community and its creator and express deep respect and gratitude for the work done. I got incomparable pleasure from studying unexpected plot intricacies, consistent and well-structured thoughts of the protagonist, as well as references to outstanding works, many of which I, to my shame, did not know.

However, the finale of the book left more questions than answers.

What will Potter's friends do when they realize that he made them orphans and did not even give the opportunity to say goodbye to parents? Why didn't he even try to persuade his fellows to confront their parents and do their best to force them to change their minds and traditions?

What will Hermione do when she will realize that Harry could stop her, yet instead left her defenceless and then turned her into golem and personal bodyguard with help of their enemy?

Will she being literally walking dead be able to give birth? Will she give birth to some kind of unicorn trolls or nearly invincible magicians on steroids? Will her descendants even try to build diplomatic relations with humans or will turn into immortal fascist?

What will other mages do, when they get to know that Harry was so afraid to loose his inner dark counselor which is part of Voldie’s soul that he spared You-Know-Who and hid him under his own and Hermione’s protection? Somehow reminds me story of Isildur from LOTR.

Maybe i'm too optimistic, but i just hope that current ending is just possible future that Hermione had seen when she had lost her consciousness during fight with slytherins. Maybe we could do better. I dunno, maybe she could ask Hufflepuff (which are depicted as local counter-intelligence service) to help her. There’s is always a better solution.

Best regards, Klen.
# Does the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative (self-)identify as an EA-aligned organization?

Effective altruism exists at the intersection of other social and intellectual movements, and communities. Some but not all of the organizations part of these communities focused on various focus areas of EA, such as existential risk reduction, identify as part of effective altruism as a movement. Such organizations are typically labeled as "EA-aligned organizations."
# Open & Welcome Thread - July 2020

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it. (You can also make a [shortform post](http://www.lesslong.com/))

And, if you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. 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), [seeing if there are any meetups in your area](https://www.lesswrong.com/community), and checking out the [Getting Started](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2rWKkWuPrgTMpLRbp/lesswrong-faq-1#Getting_Started) section of the [LessWrong FAQ](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2rWKkWuPrgTMpLRbp/lesswrong-faq-1).

The Open Thread sequence is [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/yai5mppkuCHPQmzpN).
# The Book of HPMOR Fanfics

One of my friends made a compilation of fanfics of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Ze gave me the okay to share zir work anonymously.

It has 91 stories (96 in the table of content, but 5 are missing), 12,244 pages, and 3'384'120 words "written by many exceptional muggles". 

There's a .PDF, .mobi, and .epub version of the compilation. I'm hosting all of those files, including a .jpg and .svg of the image below, in this [Google Drive folder](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1k2a3Z__KySvZ7HDjMt2za_TGNR4F76mO).

I invite y'all to share your reviews and favorite HPMOR fanfic below.

From the Preface:  
> This book is a compilation of all the [Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality](http://www.hpmor.com/) (HPMOR) fanfanfictions, metafanfictions, second-level fanfictions, recursive fanfictions, crossover-fanfictions, forked-fanfictions, fanfanfanfictions, or alternate endings I could find.

> Let's be clear at once that I do not own Harry Potter, HPMOR, its arborescence of derivatives fictions, scientific breakthroughs, or esoteric whispers, duh. All credit for the stories assembled into this book goes to their respective authors. Blessed be their horcruxes.

> The stories are ordered somewhat chronologically according to the HPMOR universe, such that reading through them in their suggested order should ensure at least some amount of cross-fic coherence.

> For a better reading experience, refer to Zedzed9's [HPMoR Fic Tree](https://harrypotterfanon.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page?file=HPMoR+Fic+Tree.svg), where stories set in universes descended from [Lesswrong](http://www.lesswrong.com/)'s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality are arranged as a cladogram.

> Happy Reading!

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/0b125f7f7351a63d68e2d3a2266ccee8d2ac30e7a6cd2c45.jpg)
# Site Redesign Feedback Requested

For the past few months, the LessWrong team has been working on a redesign for the frontpage (which comes with some overall site redesigns).

We've currently got it up on our development branch on lessestwrong.com, and would appreciate some feedback before we roll it out. (This server is for untested changes, you should not use it generally because you might be subject to horrible bugs. But, right now feedback would be helpful)

For logged out users, it looks like this:

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/deaaecbe9604d09b2cf46db56e8a05a2b15c0e921222d47c.png)

And for logged in users:

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/51ca44835033086def80dea8d27d764b7ff0d61ad67becf6.png)

Goals
=====

There are a few different goals for this. Some of the goals are a bit vague and hard-to-describe. But, some concrete goals that are easy to list for now include:

**Make the new Core Tags more visible. **

The team is currently making an overall push to finish the Tagging Feature, and get it to a state where users understand it. Having the Core Tags highly visible on the front page helps establish them as a prominent site feature. In addition:

*   The core tags help new users understand what topics LW tends to focus on.
*   You can use the Tag Filters to adjust how much content of each tag appears on the frontpage. (Hover over them to see for access) 
*   Note that you can also add new Tag filters (see the "+" button on the right)

**Reduce eyestrain and make the frontpage easier to parse**

*   Some people reported eyestrain from the solid white background, which was very bright. The new light-grey background is intended to be a bit softer on the eyes
*   The current version uses lots of horizontal lines to have divide sections, which adds a bit of clutter. The new version relies instead on the main content naturally standing out via a white background.

**Improve clarity of Recent Discussion**

*   Recent Discussion posts are more more distinguished from each other.

**Feedback Welcome**
--------------------

Let me know your thoughts in the comments, both re: the overall feel, and how specific UI elements work. 

The redesign primarily is intended to affect the frontpage, but it caused some downstream UI tweaks that required other pages to change, and I'm not sure we've finished ironing those changes out. Let us know what we missed.

If you'd like to chat in detail about your experience of the site redesign (or about the new tagging features, or about the site generally) please send me a PM or reply in the comments here and I'll schedule a time.
# The silence is deafening – Devon Zuegel

> Imagine you're at a dinner party, and you're getting into a heated argument. As you start yelling, the other people quickly hush their voices and start glaring at you. None of the onlookers have to take further action—it's clear from their facial expressions that you're being a jerk.
> 
> In digital conversations, giving feedback requires more conscious effort. Silence is the default. Participants only get feedback from people who join the fray. They receive no signal about how the silent onlookers perceive their dialogue. In fact, they don't receive much signal that onlookers observed the conversation at all.
> 
> As a result, the feedback you do receive in digital conversations is more polarized, because the only people who will engage are those who are willing to take that extra step and bear that cost of wading into a messy conversation.

It's a great post, and has a really solid UI idea in the footnotes.

> One idea I'd really like to see platforms like Twitter or Reddit try is to provide a mechanism for low-friction, private, negative feedback. For example, you could imagine offering a button where you can downvote or thumbs-down content (i.e. the opposite of a Like), but the count is only visible to the OP and not to anyone else.

The LW team has been thinking about building private responses like this for a while, but in comment form. Buttons that give more constrained private info are very interesting...
# Replicated cognitive bias list?

Given the [replication crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) in the social sciences, do we have, somewhere, a list of cognitive biases tied to replicated studies?

I could be missing something, but I didn't see anything on the [Wikipedia page]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) indicating whether or not the results replicated.
# Could Nixon going to China be a cause for the big stagnation?

The big stagnation is commonly said to have begun in the 1970s. There are many theories of possible causes that are already discussed, but haven't heard blaming Nixon before. Especially I haven't heard blaming Nixon going to China.

Timewise, that makes Nixon going to China in 1972 is an event that happened at the right time to explain the change in innovation.

Maybe it's crucial for innovation to have basic economic production to be done by skilled labor which can think of better ways to do it instead of outsourcing it to the other side of the globe?
# The Echo Fallacy

One of my Facebook friend posted this. Sharing anonymously with permission.

> The Echo Fallacy: When you shout "hello!" in a cave, and upon hearing the echo, conclude the cave walls are saying "hello" to you. More generally, when you put a certain idea into your environment, have it reflected back to you, and conclude that the reflection shows the idea originating independently from yourself.

> Some examples:

> * What Scott Adams calls "laundry list persuasion". This is when you say: "Maybe bigfoot videos are blurry and questionable, but there are so many of them! Why would there possibly be so many unless bigfoot is real?" Well, the answer is simple: bigfoot believers promote the idea of bigfoot, which prompts people to create fake bigfoot videos. The volume of bigfoot videos is merely a reflection of the belief in bigfoot. Similar logic applies to UFO videos, examples of pizza shops with spirals in their logos as evidence of a conspiracy, and the compilation of grievances against Jews over centuries. This is also related to apophenia, and the streetlight effect.

> * When you bully someone about a quality they supposedly have, until they retort, sarcastically: "Yes, I totally have that quality! I'm just the biggest possessor of that quality on the face of the planet, dingus! Now leave me alone!" Whereupon you say they've admitted to it.

> * Saying: "That guy over there loves <group>! Hey, everyone in <group>, go be friends with that guy!" Then, when some members of the group believe you and flock to that guy, saying: "See? I told you he liked them."

> (I'm probably coming up with my own name for a concept that someone else has already given a name. If so, help me out.)
# What should we do about network-effect monopolies?

Many large companies today are software monopolies that give their product away for free to get monopoly status, then do [the](https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338#issuecomment-496009417) [most](http://www.fbpurity.com/news/important-news-facebooks-legal-team-have-told-me-i-am-banned-from-facebook-because-of-f-b-purity/) [horrible](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/28/19154220/grubhub-seamless-fake-restaurant-domain-names-commission-fees) [things](https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/amazon-counterfeit-fake-products/) [once](https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/16/21293419/hey-apple-rejection-ios-app-store-dhh-gangsters-antitrust) [they’ve](https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/) [won](https://thetechnoskeptic.com/yelp-extortion-starring-role/). ([Previously](https://www.benkuhn.net/skinner/), [previously](https://www.benkuhn.net/product/).) Can we do anything about this?

Unfortunately, “you’re the product” is a popular business model for a reason: businesses like Facebook would be really hard to support without them.

Facebook would be suicidal to charge its users money, because its entire selling point is that everyone uses it, and “everyone” _hates_ paying money. In the US, Facebook makes over $40 per person on ads ([source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average-revenue-per-user-by-region/)). Can you imagine if instead of ads they tried to charge people $40 a year?

Even on the margin, anything that costs Facebook users also makes it less valuable for its remaining users—it’s a negative feedback loop. The same goes for any other site where users create value for other users, like Twitter or Craigslist or Yelp or Wikipedia. (It’s not an accident that these are some of the most stagnant popular websites!)

In fact, this is a fundamental problem with [network effects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect). If a company wants to maintain a network effect, they need as many users as possible. To get users, they have to have a free product. To keep their product free, they have to get paid by someone else. And when they start getting paid by someone else, they’ll inevitably start prioritizing that person’s interests.

Historically with other network-effect businesses, we’ve mostly addressed this via:

*   regulation (e.g. local utilities)
    
*   breakups (e.g. Bell)
    
*   standardization and interoperability (e.g. email, the Web, cryptocurrency)
    

So far for tech monopolies, people seem to be focused mostly on breakups—e.g. Facebook from Instagram/Whatsapp—but standardization seems to have produced much better outcomes in the past. (I like email and the Web a lot more than National Grid…) I’d be interested to see more exploration of that option!
# (answered: yes) Has anyone written up a consideration of Downs's "Paradox of Voting" from the perspective of MIRI-ish decision theories (UDT, FDT, or even just EDT)?

The [Paradox of Voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting), simply stated, is that voting in a large election almost certainly isn't worth your time (unless you think it's the most fun thing you could be doing). The guaranteed opportunity cost of going to vote will in most cases easily and predictably outweigh the expected benefits — the chance that your vote (along with everyone else's) would be pivotal because the margin was 1 vote, multiplied by your expected marginal utility payoff from your chosen candidate winning.

There are various well-known responses to this issue, listed in the Wikipedia article linked above. But to me, one of the obvious responses is to see this as just another instance of a chicken/snowdrift game, and to invoke the logic you might use to support cooperation in such games; that is, decision theory. I think this may even be one of the most common real-world instances where UDT/FDT might apply. I think it would also be a source of interesting edge cases for exploring the limits of UDT/FDT; that is, even small changes in how strictly you delimit which other (potential) voters to consider as UDT/FDT "co-agents" could easily swing the prescriptions you'd get. But doing a few quick google searches doesn't turn up any write-ups considering this issue in this light. Am I missing something, or is this idea really "new" (at least, undocumented)?

ETA: Thanks to @Vanessa Kosoy, @Daniel Kokotajlo, and @strangepoop, I now have sufficient references for prior discussions of this idea. Thanks! Honorable mention to @lkaxas, who suggested a connection to Kantian ethics which is relevant, though more remote than the references given by the above three.
# What are the risks of permanent injury from COVID?

I'm in my late twenties. I can easily find estimates of the risk of death, but I'm having trouble figuring out what the risk of permanent injury (e.g. fatigue) is. I figure someone on LW has probably already looked into this, so I thought I'd ask.
# Breaking Questions Down

Previously [I talked about](https://acesounderglass.com/2020/06/09/where-to-start-research/) discovering that my basic unit of inquiry should be questions, not books. But what I didn’t talk about was how to generate those questions, and how to separate good questions from bad. That’s because I don’t know yet; my own process is mysterious and implicit to me. But I can give a few examples.

For any given question, your goal is to disambiguate it into smaller questions that, if an oracle gave you the answers to all of them, would allow you to answer the original question. Best case scenario, you repeat this process and hit bedrock, an empirical question for which you can find accurate data. You feed that answer into the parent question, and eventually it bubbles up to answering your original question.

That does not always happen. Sometimes the question is one of values, not facts. Sometimes sufficient accurate information is not available, and you’re forced to use a range- an uncertainty that will bubble up through parent answers. But just having the questions will [clarify your thoughts](https://acesounderglass.com/2020/06/09/where-to-start-research/) and allow you to move more of your attention to the most important things.

Here are a few examples.  First, a reconstructed mind map of my process that led to several covid+economics posts. In the interests of being as informative as possible, this one is kind of stylized and uses developments I didn’t have at the time I actually did the research.

![Vague covid panic@2x.png](https://acesounderglass.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/vague-covid-panic402x.png?w=840)

If you’re curious about the results of this, the regular recession post is [here](https://acesounderglass.com/2020/04/19/what-happens-in-a-recession-anyway/) and the oil crisis post is [here](https://acesounderglass.com/2020/05/19/the-oil-crisis-of-1973/).

Second, a map I created but have not yet researched, on the cost/benefit profile of a dental cleaning while covid is present.

![Risk model of dental cleanings in particular@2x.png](https://acesounderglass.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/risk-model-of-dental-cleanings-in-particular402x.png?w=840)

Aside: Do people prefer the horizontal or vertical displays? Vertical would be my preference, but Whimsical does weird things with spacing so the tree ends up with a huge width either way.

Honestly this post isn’t really done; I have a lot more to figure out when it comes to how to create good questions. But I wanted to have _something_ out before I published v0.1 of my Grand List of Steps, so here we are.

Many thanks to [Rosie Campbell](https://twitter.com/rosiecampbell?lang=en) for inspiration and discussion on this idea.
# Sunday July 12 — talks by Scott Garrabrant, Alexflint, alexei, Stuart_Armstrong

This Sunday at 12:00 (PDT), we're running another session of "lightning talks" by curated LessWrong authors (see [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x46rsCLk6fyAFQsBz/this-sunday-lightning-talks-by-curated-lw-authors) and [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iZ3AisoiB6qKY6Ctz/sunday-jun-28-more-online-talks-by-curated-authors) for previous weeks' transcripts).

*   Each talk will be 3-5 minutes followed by discussion. Afterwards, we'll have a hangout in breakout rooms. The talks will be short and focus on presenting one core idea well, rather than rushing through a lot of content.
*   We want to give top LessWrong writers an interesting space to discuss their ideas, and have more fruitful collaboration between users. Think of it like a cross between an academic colloquium and some friends chatting by a whiteboard.

*If you're a curated author and interested in giving a 5-min talk at a future event, which will then be transcribed and edited, sign up* [*here*](https://forms.gle/iwFatbhys9muPmQA7)*.*

Speakers
--------

*   **Scott Garrabrant **
    *   Curated posts: [Yes Requires the Possibility of No](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5TwJ9BGxcgh5DsmQ/yes-requires-the-possibility-of-no), [Thoughts on Human Models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BKjJJH2cRpJcAnP7T/thoughts-on-human-models), [Embedded Agents](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p7x32SEt43ZMC9r7r/embedded-agents), ...
*   **alexei** — **"**The Efficient Market Hypothesis"
    *   Curated post: [Arbital postmortem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAgJJa3HLSZxsuSrf/arbital-postmortem)
*   **Alexflint**
    *   Curated posts:  [The ground of optimization](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/znfkdCoHMANwqc2WE/the-ground-of-optimization-1), [Reply to Paul Christiano's "Inaccessible Information"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/A9vvxguZMytsN3ze9/reply-to-paul-christiano-s-inaccessible-information)
*   **Stuart_Armstrong**
    *   Curated posts: [Assessing Kurzweil predictions about 2019: the results](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NcGBmDEe5qXB7dFBF/assessing-kurzweil-predictions-about-2019-the-results), [mAIry's room: AI reasoning to solve philosophical problems](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DLmhJbuhYek5rEhpH/mairy-s-room-ai-reasoning-to-solve-philosophical-problems), [Why we need a \*theory\* of human values](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zvrZi95EHqJPxdgps/why-we-need-a-theory-of-human-values)

Details
-------

**When?** Sunday July 12, 12:00 (Pacific Daylight Time)

**Where?** [https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89082417670](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89082417670)
# What problem would you like to see Reinforcement Learning applied to?

We often talk about the dangers and challenges of AI and self-improving agents, but I'm curious what you view as potential beneficial applications of AI - if any! As a ML researcher I encounter a lot of positivity and hype in the field, so the very different perspective of the rationality community would be very interesting.

Specifically I'd like to focus on reinforcement learning, because this most closely matches the concept of an AI that has agency and makes decisions. A reinforcement learning agent is usually defined as a program that interacts with an environment, maximising the sum of rewards it receives.

The environment represents the problem to be solved, and the rewards are a measure of how good the solution is. For some problems - a board game, 3-SAT - assessing a solution (giving a reward) is easy, for others computing a reward may be as difficult as solving the problem in the first place. Those are likely not good candidates to be solved with RL ;)

To facilitate discussion, I would suggest one top level reply per problem, specifying: 
- a short description of the problem
- the action space - how does the agent interact with the problem / environment
- the reward - how do we know the agent has done well?

Disclaimer: I work on RL, so if you make suggestions that are feasible and would have substantial positive impact on the world, I may pursue them.
# Nicotinamide riboside vs. SARS-coV-2 update

  

You may recall my previous rants about nicotinamide riboside vs. SARS-CoV-2. They have been borne out so far... there has been a human trial on NR in Denmark since May 28, the NIH just announced a hamster preclinical yesterday to be done in their BL4, and Brenner lab has updated the original work just today with more confirmatory results (link below).

Unlike the quinones, remdesivir, and bleach, NR has no dangerous side effects. Very frustrating to see this never mentioned except in overseas press.

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.047480v5.article-info](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.047480v5.article-info)