Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# Rent Needs to Decrease

Here's part of a comment I got on my [housing coalitions post](https://www.jefftk.com/p/realigning-housing-coalitions):

> I consider it extremely unlikely you have found renters with the expectation of rent going down. Assuming they want to live in a well maintained building, I consider unlikely they even desire it, once they think about it. What renters hope for in general is increases that are less than their increases in income. Landlords mostly do expect that rents will go up, but the magnitude of their expectations matters, many have the same expectations as renters for moderate increases. Others will have short term/transactional thinking and will want to charge what the market will bear.

This seems worth being explicit about: when I talk about how I think rents should be lower, I really mean lower. I'm not trying to say that it's ok if rent keeps rising as long as incomes rise faster, but that rents should go down.

Here are Boston rents [in June 2011](https://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices/index#2011-06-16&2):

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/boston-rents-june-2011.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices/index#2011-06-16&2)

And [in June 2019](https://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices/index#2019-06-18&2):

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/boston-rents-june-2019.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices/index#2019-06-18&2)

*These are on the same scale, though not adjusted for inflation (13% from 2011-06 to 2019-06).*

In 2011 a two-bedroom apartment in my part of Somerville would have gone for $1800/month, or $2050/month in 2019 dollars. In 2019, it would be $3000/month. Compared to 13% inflation we have 67% higher rents.

Another way to look at this is that for what you would pay now for an apartment a ten-minute walk from Davis would, in 2011, have covered an apartment a ten-minute walk from Park St. And what you would have been paying for a Harvard Sq apartment in 2011 wouldn't get you an East Arlington apartment today.

These large increases have been a windfall for landlords. Property taxes haven't risen much, upkeep is similar, but because demand has grown so much without supply being permitted to rise to meet it the market rent is much higher. If we build enough new housing that rents fall to 2011 levels, landlords will make less money than they had been hoping, but they'll still be able to afford to keep up their properties.

I'll support pretty much any project that builds more bedrooms: market rate, affordable, public, transitional. Rents are so high that all of these would still be worth building and maintaining even if everyone could see were were building enough housing that rents would fall next year to 2011 levels.

As a homeowner and a landlord, I know that this means I would get less in rent and I'm ok with that. I value a healthy community that people can afford to live in far more than a market that pays me a lot of money for being lucky enough to have bought a two-family at a good time.
# Planned Power Outages

With the dubiously motivated PG&E blackouts in California there are [many stories](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-11/pge-power-outage-darkness-stress-debt-vulnerable) [about how](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/I-m-overwhelmed-PG-E-power-outage-leaves-14505719.php) [lack of power](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03086-2) [is a serious problem](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/us/california-power-outage.html), especially for people with medical dependencies on electricity. Examples they give include people who:

*   Have severe sleep apnea, and can't safely sleep without a CPAP.
    
*   Sleep on a mattress that needs continous electricity to prevent it from deflating.
    
*   Need to keep their insulin refrigerated.
    
*   Use a medicine delivery system that requires electricity every four hours to operate.
    

This outage was dangerous for them and others, but it also seems like a big problem that they're in a position where they need absolutely reliable grid power. Even without politically motivated outages, the grid isn't built to a standard of complete reliabilty.

There's an awkward valley between "reasonably reliable, but with a major outage every few years in a storm or something" and "completely reliable, and you can trust your life on it" where the system is reliable enough that we stop thinking of it as something that might go away but it's not so reliable that we should.

We can't get California out of this valley by investing to the point that there won't be outages; earthquakes, if nothing else, ensure that. So instead we should plan for outages, and make outages frequent enough that this planning will actually happen. Specifically:

*   Insurance should cover backup power supplies for medical equipment, and they should be issued by default.
    
*   When there hasn't been an outage in ~1y, there should be a test outage to uncover unknown dependencies.
    

While this outage was probably not done for good reasons, the problems it has uncovered are ones we need to fix.
# AI alignment landscape

Here ([link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1178&v=-vsYtevJ2bc)) is a talk I gave at EA Global 2019, where I describe how [intent alignment](https://ai-alignment.com/clarifying-ai-alignment-cec47cd69dd6) fits into the broader landscape of “making AI go well,” and how my work fits into intent alignment. This is particularly helpful if you want to understand what I’m doing, but may also be useful more broadly. I often find myself wishing people were clearer about some of these distinctions.

Here is the main overview slide from the talk:

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*lWrTk7ibP-mUTOL481Gheg.png)

The highlighted boxes are where I spend most of my time.

[Here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QO11xtWSvtD8nS1SU4XukGF1WWG6O8-6/view?usp=sharing) are the full slides from the talk.
# What's going on with "provability"?

Every so often I hear seemingly mathematical statements involving the concept of being _provable_. For example:

*   I've seen Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem stated as "if a mathematical system is powerful enough to express arithmetic, then either it contains a contradiction or there are true statements that it cannot prove."
*   On the AI alignment forum, one of the pinned sequences describes Löb's Theorem as "If Peano Arithmetic can prove that a proof of P would imply the truth of P, then it can also prove P is true".

I find each of these statements baffling for a different reason:

*   Gödel: What could it mean for a statement to be "true but not provable"? Is this just because there are some statements such that neither P nor not-P can be proven, yet one of them must be true? If so, I would (stubbornly) contest that perhaps P and not-P really are both non-true.
*   Löb: How can a system of _arithmetic_ prove anything? Much less prove things _about proofs_?

And I also have one more general confusion. What systems of reasoning could these kinds of theorems be set in? For example, I've heard that there are proofs that PA is consistent. Let's say one of those proofs is set in Proof System X. Now how do we know that Proof System X is consistent? Perhaps it can be proven consistent by using Proof System Y? Do we just end up making an infinite chain of appeals up along a tower of proof systems? Or do we eventually drive ourselves into the ground by reaching system that _nobody_ could deny is valid? If so, why don't we just stop and PA or ZFC?

Oh, speaking of ZFC. There seems to be a debate about whether we should accept the Axiom of Choice. Isn't it...obviously true? I don't really understand this topic well enough to have any particular question about the AC debate, but my confusion definitely extends to that region of concept space.

So here's my question: **Where can I learn about "provability" and/or what clarifying insights could you share about it?**
# MA Price Accuracy Law

Massachusetts has an interesting law for grocery stores to make sure price scanners are configured correctly: if your item rings up for more than the price on the shelf you get one for free (or $10 off it's it's more than $10). Specifically:

> if there is a discrepancy between the advertised price, the sticker price, the scanner price or the display price and the checkout price on any grocery item, a food store or a food department shall charge a consumer the lowest price. If the checkout price or scanner price is not the lowest price or does not reflect any qualifying discount, the seller:
> 
> *   shall not charge the consumer for 1 unit of the grocery item, if the lowest price is $10 or less;
>     
> *   shall charge the consumer the lowest price less $10 for 1 unit of the grocery item, if the lowest price is more than $10
>     
> 
>   — [MGL I.XV.94.184.C](https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXV/Chapter94/Section184C)

The grocery store is required to put a sign at each register describing the law, which means that when you notice this you can point to the sign. Which is way better than trying to show the cashier the relevant text of the law on your phone would be.

I have fun trying to remember the price I see for each item as I put it into my cart so if it rings up at a different price I can point that out. The law has an exception for cases where the price is a "gross error" (off by half) but in most cases discrepancies are small: ringing up at $4.99 when it said $4.50 on the shelf. Because you get the item for free if they've overcharged you, however, what matters is just that they put a misleadingly low price on the shelf.

I've noticed stores rarely have a good system in place for fixing these problems. When I catch one they generally check and give me the item for free, but that doesn't usually translate into fixing the price on the shelf. Which means that when I come in next time, it's often still wrong.

This seems like something that a group of shoppers could use together. Whenever anyone noticed a mispricing they could post to a mailing list ("the store brand blueberries are marked $3.99 but ring up as $4.29"), and then everyone on the list could go get some free blueberries. This would probably get stores to be faster about updating their prices.

Even if the stores got very fast at fixing things, though, it could still be rough for them. Say one person goes through and notices they've been overcharged for something. They don't say anything to the store, but instead write to the list and name a time. At the designated time a group of shoppers pick up one unit each and fan out over the store's checkout lines. The items are all scanned, the shoppers all object, and the store has to give away one item per checkout line instead of just one item total. This could be a parody heist plotline in a sitcom.

(While this is hard to fix with technical means, if people started doing it, of course, they would update the law.)

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100115719998032)*
# 
The best of the www, in my opinion

Below I will present a (small but qualitative ) list of those that I think are some of the best sites/blog that a human being can find on the world wide web.

The main criterion I used to draw up the list was to consider how the websites promote the dissemination of knowledge among people and how, over the course of time, they have helped me both with regards to work and in terms of intellectual self-formation. The order in which they are listed is not to be considered restrictive ( except perhaps for the first two ).

Please feel free to criticize the catalog (as long as the criticisms are rational and constructive) and to expand it in the comments.

  

* * *

1) Stack Exchange Concentrator ( [https://stackexchange.com/sites](https://stackexchange.com/sites) )

2) ArXiv e-Print archive ( [https://arxiv.org/](https://arxiv.org/) )

3) GitHub ( [https://github.com/](https://github.com/) )

4) Reddit - the front page of the internet ( [https://www.reddit.com/](https://www.reddit.com/) )

5) LessWrong ( [https://www.lesswrong.com/](https://www.lesswrong.com/) )

6) Shtetl-Optimized ( [https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/) )

7) Slate Star Codex ( [https://slatestarcodex.com/author/admin/](https://slatestarcodex.com/author/admin/) )

8) YouTube ( [https://www.youtube.com/?hl=it&gl=IT](https://www.youtube.com/?hl=it&gl=IT) )

9) TED ( [https://www.ted.com/#/](https://www.ted.com/#/) )

10) Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( [https://plato.stanford.edu/](https://plato.stanford.edu/) )

11) Google Scholar ( [https://scholar.google.com/](https://scholar.google.com/) )

12) SciHub (Banned - no more reacheable on the www from my country)
# Reposting previously linked content on LW

This question might be a bit specific to me, but maybe it applies to others so I'll ask publicly so the answer becomes more visible to all.

Is there are a policy or what are your thoughts on posting content on LW that was previously the subject of a link post?

In my case most of these are from the dying days of the LW 1.0 era. In the last few months I've switched from linking to cross-posting from my blog as LW 2.0 has taken off and proven to be a good host for my content. I could update those old posts with the content just to mirror it over on LW, but that also feels a bit sad because if I'm going to do the (admittedly minor) formatting work necessary to bring the posts over and have them look nice, I'd also like it if they became more visible to folks, especially for that content that I think people would like to see but may have missed because it was linked at a time when LW was pretty inactive and so those old, updated posts wouldn't well reflect the engagement that might receive now. However, I can also see some danger in this as maybe someone could take this as license to abuse the policy and repost a lot of stuff from years ago to make it fresh again even when it did previously receive appropriate levels of engagement because it was being posted at a time when LW was more active.

This is obviously mostly a question for the moderators but other people's opinions are probably worthwhile as evidence for the mods to consider.

(On an unrelated note, I'd actually be pretty happy to move my blog to LW from Medium, which I know has been floated as a possible future feature, but I'd need some way to keep links working, which is thankfully eased by having a custom domain and not needing to redirect raw Medium articles, as well as a way for my domain to sit in front of my LW content but not all LW content.)
# What's your big idea?

At any one time I usually have between 1 and 3 "big ideas" I'm working with. These are generally broad ideas about how some thing works with many implications for how the rest of the whole world works. Some big ideas I've grappled with over the years, in roughy historical order:

*   evolution
*   everything is computation
*   superintelligent AI is default dangerous
*   existential risk
*   everything is information
*   Bayesian reasoning is optimal reasoning
*   evolutionary psychology
*   Getting Things Done
*   game theory
*   developmental psychology
*   positive psychology
*   phenomenology
*   AI alignment is not defined precisely enough
*   everything is control systems (cybernetics)
*   epistemic circularity
*   Buddhist enlightenment is real and possible
*   perfection
*   predictive coding grounds human values

I'm sure there are more. Sometimes these big ideas come and go in the course of a week or month: I work the idea out, maybe write about it, and feel it's wrapped up. Other times I grapple with the same idea for years, feeling it has loose ends in my mind that matter and that I need to work out if I'm to understand things adequately enough to help reduce existential risk.

**So with that as an example, tell me about your big ideas, past and present.**

I kindly ask that if someone answers and you are thinking about commenting, please be nice to them. I'd like this to be a question where people can share even their weirdest, most wrong-on-reflection big ideas if they want to without fear of being downvoted to oblivion or subject to criticism of their reasoning ability. If you have something to say that's negative about someone's big ideas, please be nice and say it as clearly about the idea and not the person (violators will have their comments deleted and possibly banned from commenting on this post or all my posts, so I mean it!).
# Polyamory is Rational(ist)

Using survey data to explore the connection between polyamory, Rationality, intuition, evolutionary psychology, weirdness, religion, utopianism, consequentialism, and San Francisco Bay.

I'm [linking](https://putanumonit.com/2019/10/16/polyamory-is-rational/) instead of cross-posting because there's a huge number of charts and a good discussion already going on Putanumonit, but [here's a glimpse](https://putanumonit.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/becoming-poly.png) to whet your appetite:

![](https://putanumonit.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/becoming-poly.png)
# Invisible Choices, Made by Default

There are two popular language learning software platforms: Anki and Duolingo. Anki is hard, free and effective. Duolingo is easy, commercial and ineffective.

The number of Duolingo users far outstrips the number of Anki users. Duolingo has 8 million downloads on the Play Store. Anki has 40 thousand. So there are 200 Duolingo users for every Anki user[^1]. If you ask a random language learner what software to use they'll probably suggest Duolingo. If you ask a random *successful* language learner what software to use they'll probably suggest Anki. Most language learners are unsuccessful.

It should be no surprise that most language learners use an ineffective product. Learning a language is hard. Duolingo is designed to attract as many customers as it can. Therefore Duolingo must be easy to use. Anki is designed to work. Therefore Anki must be hard to use[^2]. Effectiveness and mass-adoption are mutually exclusive.

On average, you'll have to ask 200 language learners what software they use before one of them tells you about Anki. In practice, you are unlikely to stumble across Anki at all. **You can only find out about Anki if you go looking for it and you'll only go looking for it if you already know it exists.**

No one ever told me about most of the software I use. Usually I'll infer that it must exist and then go looking for it. This is how I discovered qutebrowser, Spacemacs, tmux, i3 and—of course—Anki.

This principle isn't limited to open source software. Everything I've ever taken seriously exhibits a similar pattern. There's a common way most people do it and there's a cheaper, better, skill-intensive way a tiny minority do it.

Minority opinions are inherently controversial. Here are a few (relatively) uncontroversal examples to illustrate the trend:
- Vim keybindings vs. conventional hotkeys
- Lisps vs. programming languages without syntactic macros
- Good history books vs. the news
- Powerlifting vs. popular exercise *de jour*
- Tiling window managers vs. the desktop metaphor

If you disagree with one of the examples above that's okay but I [won't reply](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/3xKXGh9RXaYTYZYgZ/p/vEGqDWDTnZ82eXo3J) to you in the comments.

I don't mind choosing to be part of the majority. I watch mainstream movies. I eat at popular restaurants. I perform the oldest magic tricks in the book. I'm okay with these choices I know about.

I make most of my choices unknowingly, by default, from the options presented to me. **Most of the time I pick Duolingo over Anki without ever knowing I've made a choice.**

[^1]: I'm ignoring the Anki desktop app, the med student userbase, the paywalling of the iPhone Anki app and differences in churn to simplify this example and because I don't have the relevant numbers.

[^2]: I mean that effective spaced repetition is inherently difficult. The Anki onboarding experience could be improved without loss of utility.
# Mediums Overpower Messages

I've observed that consuming certain kinds of media make me smarter and other kinds of media makes me dumber.

Makes me dumber:
- Videogames
- YouTube
- News

Makes me smarter:
- Books
- Audiobooks
- Direct messaging apps

By "smarter" I mean it holistically causes me to behave in a way that increases my overall rate of learning and quality of life. By "dumber" I mean the opposite.

For a long time I rejected this conclusion. Surely playing *Kerbal Space Program* must be more educational than reading *Yu-gi-oh!* manga. Nope. *Yu-gi-oh!* beats it by a long shot. I ran a long series of subjective personal experiments on a variety of timescales over many years. They all confirmed this theory[^1]. The medium overpowers the message.

What I am watching on TV is irrelevant compared against the fact that I am watching TV.

I can even  plot different mediums on a scale from "makes me dumber" to "makes me smarter" and it use to infer why different mediums have the effect they do.

- **Makes Me Dumber**
- [BAD & DANGEROUS] Videogames
- [BAD & DANGEROUS] Media feeds
- [BAD & DANGEROUS] YouTube
- [BAD & ADDICTIVE] News
- [BAD] Stack Exchange
- [BAD] Web surfing
- Blogs
- Movies
- Webcomics 
- Comic books (fiction)
- [OKAY] Books (fiction)
- [OKAY] Podcasts
- [OKAY] Direct messaging (native language)
- [GOOD] Audiobooks (nonfiction)
- [GOOD] Books (nonfiction)
- [GOOD] Direct messaging (foreign language)
- [GOOD] Blogging
- [GOOD] Books (textbooks)
- [GOOD] Writing software
- [VERY GOOD] Making videos
- [VERY GOOD] Drawing comics
- [VERY GOOD] Spaced Repetition Software
- **Makes Me Smarter**

There is a symmetry to this sorting. Playing videogames is near the top but writing software is near the bottom. Watching YouTube is near the top but making YouTube videos is near the bottom. The smarter creating a certain kind of media makes me the dumber consuming it does.

In fact, this whole list is just sorted by difficulty. The harder a medium is to consume (or create, as applicable) the smarter it makes me. The difficulty of consuming a medium is dominated by the medium itself, not its content.

That feels wrong. Intuitively, it makes sense that certain mediums should facilitate better content and that's why they're educational. Nope. For me, it's the medium itself.

[^1]: There are handful of exceptions. In particular, downloading certain kinds of videos from YouTube and watching them locally can make me smarter. But even this illustrates the power of the medium. Watching YouTube in a web browser has a different effect on me than downloading those exact same videos and watching them with `mplayer`.
# We tend to forget complicated things

One consistent pattern I've noticed in studying math is that, if some material feels very difficult, then I might remember it in an upcoming exam, but I will almost certainly have forgotten most of it one year later. The success story behind permanent knowledge gain is almost always "this was hard once but now it's easy, so obviously I didn't forget it" and almost never "I successfully memorized a lot of complicated-feeling things."

I think this also applies outside of mathematics. If it's roughly correct, then the most obvious consequence is to adapt your behavior when you're learning something. Provided that your goal is to improve your understanding permanently by understanding the material conceptually (which, of course, may not be the case), either study until it gets easy, or decide it's not worth your time at all, but don't stop when you've just barely understood it.

I've violated this rule many times, and I think it has resulted in some pretty inefficient use of time.
# Where to absolutely start?

Hi there!

I'm a new member and now feeling giddy from the amount of contents presented here on the site. I've read those welcome and FAQ posts, they all point to the library's core reading as material for beginners. BUT... I've just finished the Preface post of R:A-Z, and from the author's very words, it looks like this series focus more on the big, vague things than those hands-on lessons.

So my questions are: among it and the Codex and HPMOR, which is the most newbie-friendly? In your opinion, what are the best 9 sequences rookies like me should read to get to a somewhat intermediate level, in order?

Thanks & cheers!
# What economic gains are there in life extension treatments?

To put it another way: does stopping or slowing aging save resources for society as a whole, compared to raising new humans to replace old ones?

Plausible economic gains from life extension:

*   [Raising a human from birth to age 17 in the United States costs about $234K.](https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-cost-of-raising-a-child)
*   Retired people largely live off their savings; their economic activity is almost entirely consumption. Life extension would presumably allow people to stay productively employed in the workforce longer.

Plausible economic losses:

*   Death of society's "old guard" may be serving a useful purpose by destroying calcified institutions and ideas, allowing better ones to bloom.

This question is important because, if it turns out that raising new humans to replace old ones is at least as resource-efficient as anti-aging treatments, then inter-society competition will not particularly favor anti-aging investment.
# Multi-belled Brass

Yesterday afternoon I got excited about a new design for a brass instrument. Conical bore instruments have the problem that you can't combine valves (or slides) with having the tubing consistently expand over the length of the instrument. The valves force you to have a cylindrical bore segment in the center, and while you can [design the tubing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._A._Couturier) to minimize the cylindrical segment, you do have to have some.

Or do you? Imagine you have seven bells, with a single rotary valve that has seven positions, one for each bell. You use the standard fingering, with keys to rotate the valve 1/7, 2/7, and 3/7. This gets you approximately the same options for tubing length as a standard brass instrument, except that you no longer need to make [compromises](https://www.jefftk.com/p/trumpets-belong-in-c): pushing in all three keys brings you down exactly six half steps and you don't need a tuning slide to compensate. You can play chromatically, and you play it just like a trumpet, baritone, or tuba.

It looks like Adolphe Sax [tried something like this](http://www.mim.be/trombone-with-7-bells), but with six two-position piston valves instead of a seven-position rotary valve, and he was just trying to solve the tuning problem and not the bore problem:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/seven-bell-six-valve-trombone.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/seven-bell-six-valve-trombone-big.jpg)

But then I found something even weirder: [1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkl4IcPuzM), [2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSlMWSwlY78), [3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fxc29ESYxg), [4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxC8FC2DR2U), [5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVQHhOraeTg).

It turns out there's a somewhat successful instrument along these lines, but for totally different reasons. Instead of being optimized for tone, it's optimized for being easy to play. Each instrument has one horn per note, typically eight, so a range of just eight notes. The base of each horn has a reed, so you don't need any sort of embouchure, you just blow. See [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2d-6SY2Uqg#t=165) where someone takes one apart to demonstrate. They seem to be German; to find more videos search for "Schalmeien", while if you want to buy one (please don't) search for "Schalmei".

I do think a rotary trumpet, played chromatically with trumpet fingering, could work well though, and I'm curious whether anyone has explored this.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100117906052162)*
# Iron: From mythical to mundane

> Metalworking is one of the oldest crafts, going back far beyond recorded history. But until a few thousand years ago, one of the most abundant metals—iron—was virtually unknown. The ancient Egyptians and Sumerians knew iron only from meteors, and considered it heavenly, a gift from the gods. Later civilizations discovered how to smelt it, and their period came to be known as the Iron Age, but they didn’t know how to consistently make it strong, and not brittle. During the Industrial Revolution, we discovered how to make it strong, consistent, and even cheap.
>
> Now high-quality steel is everywhere around us: holding up our buildings (in both girders and reinforced [concrete](https://rootsofprogress.org/instant-stone-just-add-water)), in our cars and ships, in trains and their rails, in bridges and towers, in [electrical infrastructure](https://rootsofprogress.org/why-ac-won), in refrigerators and washing machines, in pots and pans, in forks and knives, in hammers and saws, in nails and screws, in tables and chairs.
>
> The wonder of the metal is gone, but the wonder of the process remains. A steel foundry is an amazing sight, with enormous blast furnaces several stories high, raging at thousands of degrees 24/7, attended by a swarm of workers, like a great beast with an insatiable hunger for ore, coke, and lime.
>
> The product they put out is of such purity and consistency that it would be hailed by the ancients as a miracle, a feat of craftsmanship possible only through divine intervention. But in the modern economy, it is a commodity.
>
> What is this material? Why is it so hard to make? And how did it go from mythical to mundane?

Full post with lots of images: [https://rootsofprogress.org/iron-from-mythical-to-mundane](https://rootsofprogress.org/iron-from-mythical-to-mundane)
# What is the connection between these two definitions of ascription universality?

[Definition A:](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R5Euq7gZgobJi5S25/nuances-with-ascription-universality)

> a system is ascription universal if, relative to our current epistemic state, its explicit beliefs contain just as much information as any other way of ascribing beliefs to it.

[Definition B:](https://ai-alignment.com/towards-formalizing-universality-409ab893a456)

> a family of question-answering systems **A**\[**·**\] are _ascription universal_ (w.r.t. 𝔼 and L) if **A**\[**C**\] epistemically dominates **C** for every computation **C**.

This definition is more technical, but Christiano describes the underlying intuition as follows:

> "ascription universality,” which tries to capture the property that a question-answering system **A** is better-informed than any particular simpler computation **C**.

  

I'm totally failing to see the connection between these two definitions.

  

A few things I find especially confusing:

1\. Definition A seems to measure the transparency/honesty of a single system, whereas definition B seems to measure the knowledge of one system relative to another. Why are these concepts related?

2\. Wouldn't an automatic photosensitive streetlight be "ascription universal" by definition A? The explicit way of assigning beliefs to the streetlight "if the light is on, the system believes it's dark outside; otherwise the system believes it's light outside". From our epistemic standpoint, there's no way to ascribe other beliefs to it that contain more information than the explicit beliefs, so it appears to satisfy the criterion. However, I don't think a streetlight has any of the nice properties you would want an "ascription universal" system to have (in particular, it wouldn't be an effective overseer in IDA...)

  

Edit: After thinking about this some more, my best guess is that definition A is meant to describe the epistemically _dominated_ computation from definition B. I _think_ a computation satisfying definition A would be epistemically dominated by our current epistemic state (though I'm not sure if that's a coherent thing to say given that epistemic dominance is also defined relative to our current epistemic state). Similarly, if a particular computation C satisfies definition A, then an overseer that can understand A's explicit beliefs can (I think??) epistemically dominate C.

  

If this line of thinking is correct, I'm marginally less confused...
# [Site Update] Subscriptions, Bookmarks, & Pingbacks

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# How do you assess the quality / reliability of a scientific study?

When you look at a paper, what signs cause you to take it seriously? What signs cause you to discard the study as too poorly designed to be much evidence one way or the other?

I'm hoping to compile a repository of heuristics on study evaluation, and would love to hear people's tips and tricks, or their full evaluation-process.

I'm looking for things like...

*   "If the n (sample size) is below \[some threshold value\], I usually don't pay much attention."
*   "I'm mostly on the lookout for big effect sizes."
*   "I read the abstract, then I spend a few minutes thinking about how I would design the experiment, including which confounds I would have to control for, and how I could do that. Then I read the methods section, and see how their study design compares to my 1-3 minute sketch. Does their design seem sensible? Are they accounting for the first-order-obvious confounds?"
*   etc.
# The Technique Taboo

For a strange few decades that may just be starting to end, if you went to art school you'd be ostracised by your teachers for trying to draw good representational art. "Representational art" means pictures that look like real things. Art school actively discouraged students from getting better at drawing.

"Getting better at drawing" is off-topic at my weekly local drawing club too. I've literally never heard it discussed.

This taboo extends far beyond art. My nearest gym forbids weightlifters from using electronic systems to log their progress. I'm friends with programmers who can't touch type. None of them use Vim macros.

> "I have sometimes suspected that the quickest way to get worried looks from many modern Western meditation teachers is to talk about practice in a way that implies the attempt to actually master anything." — Daniel M. Ingram

In the part of the United States where I live, the subject of skill is often taboo. Not just relative differences in skill level between specific present individuals (which would make sense). **The implicit acknowledgement of skill as a trainable attribute is taboo.**

Not all professions have this issue. Math is still math. Biology is still biology. One can politely discuss a cook's cooking. Magicians respect coin manipulation like it's 1904.

But when traditional colleges supply the labor force for a professional trade outside of academia, that's when discussion of skill (*especially* rote learning) becomes taboo[^1]. College students learn everything about their trade except how to do it. Then we maintain a collective silence concerning technique.

- A Chinese major teaches you how to talk about Chinese, not how to read it.
- An English major teaches you how to talk about novels, not how to write one.
- An art major teaches you how to talk about masterpieces, not how to create one.
- A Computer Science Engineering major…well, you get the idea.

That's a partial explanation, but it doesn't explain why skill differences in weightlifting and meditation are also taboo.

Societies make taboo exactly those topics whose mere discussion threatens the precarious dominance of those at the top of the social order by drawing attention to the system's internal contradictions.

I think my society is hiding something from itself.

[^1]: Medical school is an exception to this pattern. This may be because medical school considers itself a form of technical training, to be undergone after acquiring a liberal undergraduate education.
# Halloween

[Leonard Cohen on his poetic voice](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/462001-as-i-grew-older-i-understood-that-instructions-came-with):

> “As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”

This is apparently exactly the opposite of how most people in the American world feel at this time of year. The great inevitable defeat should be expressed with electronically jeering plastic skeletons, humorous fake corpses, faux-threatening gravestones, and—let’s not forget the violence and disease responsible for so many deaths—generous fake blood, vomit, and slime. The celebration should be not only frivolous and ugly to the max, but really go hard on minimizing dignity! Don’t just dress as a fun ugly corpse, make it a sexually depraved fun ugly corpse!

Isn’t this just a bit weird? For instance, how is this good? 

I’ve heard a couple of times something like: “Halloween is nice because it is rebellious, and a relief from all that seriousness. People usually treat these things with sacredness and somberness, and it’s a lot to deal with.”

If that’s what it is, would it also be cool if we incorporated more second-rate stand up comedy routines and pranks into funerals? Or had more fun smallpox themed parties?

I don’t think people do actually contend with death or horror in a more comfortable way via Halloween, for the most part. My guess is that they basically don’t think about the content of what they are doing, and just get used to hunting for bargain plastic corpse babies to put on their lawns, and laughing with each other about how realistic and gruesome they are. Which seems more like desensitization than coming to terms with a thing. Which I doubt is a good kind of relief from seriousness. 

Also, if we are going to have a change of mood break around the potential horrors of life, the alternate feelings and purposes Halloween suggests just don’t seem very good. ‘Trick or treat?’ Cheap malice or cheap hedonism? Quick, find a huge mound of junk food, I forgot because I’m very competitive about drunkenly parading my buttocks in a way that makes me seem clever..

I’m obviously missing something, and I don’t actually blame anyone much within reason for getting into the holidays of their culture, but come on culture, what is this?
# Rohin Shah on reasons for AI optimism

[![](http://aiimpacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/rohin_shah-300x300.jpg)](http://aiimpacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/rohin_shah.jpg)

Rohin Shah

I along with several AI Impacts researchers recently talked to talked to Rohin Shah about why he is relatively optimistic about AI systems being developed safely. Rohin Shah is a 5th year PhD student at the [Center for Human-Compatible AI](https://humancompatible.ai/) (CHAI) at Berkeley, and a prominent member of the Effective Altruism community.

Rohin reported an unusually large (90%) chance that AI systems will be safe without additional intervention. His optimism was largely based on his belief that AI development will be relatively gradual and AI researchers will correct safety issues that come up.

He reported two other beliefs that I found unusual: He thinks that as AI systems get more powerful, they will actually become _more_ interpretable because they will use features that humans also tend to use. He also said that intuitions from AI/ML make him skeptical of claims that evolution baked a lot into the human brain, and he thinks there’s a ~50% chance that we will get AGI within two decades via a broad training process that mimics the way human babies learn.

A full transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for concision and clarity, can be found [here](https://aiimpacts.org/conversation-with-rohin-shah/).

_By Asya Bergal_
# Is there a definitive intro to punishing non-punishers?

Hey LW.  I've just written a draft of an article, that I'm trying to edit to link to useful prior notes on various concepts.  One of those concepts is the idea that we evolved to "punish the non-punishers", in order to ensure the costs of social punishment are shared by everyone.

The thing is, I vividly remember reading an article from the rationalsphere that introduced me to this idea many years ago, but I cannot seem to find it anywhere.  The idea is *mentioned* many places where I could have seen the original article, including on Overcoming Bias, Slate Star Codex, and Less Wrong, but all my searches seem to find passing mentions in comments, or throwaway mentions in articles assuming you already know what it means.

Since my article will otherwise continue this apparent tradition of assuming everyone knows what it means and not linking to an introduction, can anyone point me to the article I'm recalling, or perhaps suggest another good *non-technical* introduction to the idea (i.e. *not* [this paper](https://henrich.fas.harvard.edu/files/henrich/files/henrich_boyd_2001.pdf)), so readers of the article I'm writing who aren't yet familiar with the idea can learn about it?  Thanks!
# Doing things in a populated world

The world has lots of people and things in it. And they are organized in such a mishmash that changing a thing will often make large numbers of people better off or worse off. And for a big thing—even a very good big thing—the number who are worse off is very unlikely to be zero.

This means that if you want to do big things, you will either have to make some people worse off, or rearrange the gains to make everyone better off.

If there are only a small number of people involved, you might be able to make everyone better off with a careful choice of things to change. But if the group is large, you will probably need some sort of generic value fluid, that can flow between the parties and fill in the holes such as to make everyone a bit better off, instead of some people much better off and some people worse off. Money and social respect both fill this role, assuming that there aren’t other impediments to using them, but a giant barrel of compensatory apricots might also work.

This suggests that whether big changes are made depends on the availability of workable value fluid, along with the propensity of the powerful to make the less powerful worse off without compensation. The availability of workable value fluid might for instance change according to social or technical technology for maintaining it, as well as impediments to using that technology.

For instance, if a large group of people were already headed to restaurant A, but the group would on net prefer restaurant B, they might not make this switch, because someone who prefers B would have to raise the issue, and it would feel a bit too much like conflict (and annoyance of extra negotiation for everyone). However if a couple of the people who prefer B actually own B and can offer drinks on the house to the group—and that is enough for everyone to prefer B, including the B owners—the switch can happen more easily. (I’m really thinking of things like shifts in legislation or giant infrastructure projects, but much more of my own experience is with groups going to restaurants.)

Is this right? Is it a big factor? (Theoretically salient mechanisms can be pretty minor in the real world.)