Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners

Bets and bonds are tools for handling different epistemic states and levels of trust. Which makes them a great fit for negotiating with small children!

A few weeks ago Anna (4y) wanted to play with some packing material. It looked very messy to me, I didn't expect she would clean it up, and I didn't want to fight with her about cleaning it up. I considered saying no, but after thinking about how things like this are handled in the real world I had an idea. If you want to do a hazardous activity, and we think you might go bankrupt and not clean up, we make you post a bond. This money is held in escrow to fund the cleanup if you disappear. I explained how this worked, and she went and got a dollar:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/green-paper-bond-coin.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/green-paper-bond-coin-big.jpg)

Then:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/green-paper-bond1.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/green-paper-bond1-big.jpg)

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/green-paper-bond3.jpg)](https://www.jefftk.com/green-paper-bond3-big.jpg)

When she was done playing, she cleaned it up without complaint and got her dollar back. If she hadn't cleaned it up, I would have, and kept the dollar.

Some situations are more complicated, and call for bets. I wanted to go to a park, but Lily (6y) didn't want to go to that park because the last time we had been there there'd been lots of bees. I remembered that had been a summer with unusually many bees, and it no longer being that summer or, in fact, summer at all, I was not worried. Since I was so confident, I offered my $1 to her $0.10 that we would not run into bees at the park. This seemed fair to her, and when there were no bees she was happy to pay up.

Over time, they've learned that my being willing to bet, especially at large odds, is pretty informative, and often all I need to do is offer. Lily was having a rough morning, crying by herself about a project not working out. I suggested some things that might be fun to do together, and she rejected them angrily. I told her that often when people are feeling that way, going outside can help a lot, and when she didn't seem to believe me I offered to bet. Once she heard the 10:1 odds I was offering her I think she just started expecting that I was right, and she decided we should go ride bikes. (She didn't actually cheer up when we got outside: she cheered up as soon as she made this decision.)

I do think there is some risk with this approach that the child will have a bad time just to get the money, or say they are having a bad time and they are actually not, but this isn't something we've run into. Another risk, if we were to wager large amounts, would be that the child would end up less happy than if I hadn't interacted with them at all. I handle this by making sure not to offer a bet I think they would regret losing, and while this is not a courtesy I expect people to make later in life, I think it's appropriate at their ages.

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100199782012082)*
# Open & Welcome Thread - January 2021

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

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 invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

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). If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the new [Concepts section](https://www.lesswrong.com/tags/all).

The Open Thread tag is [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/open-threads?sortedBy=new). The Open Thread sequence is [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/yai5mppkuCHPQmzpN).
# Ways to be more agenty?

Akrasia is not really good. Being more of an agent is pretty good.

Are there actual ways to become more of an agent? Especially lesser-known ways.

~~Dumb, expensive, and dangerous ideas only please~~. Assume I'm looking for answers *besides* "sleep more" or "drink water" or "you don't *really* want to be agenty".
# Intended enjoyment

I am sometimes unsure what is meant to be enjoyed in things, for instance the short story [_The Gioconda Smile_](https://worldspiritsockpuppet.com/2021/01/04/giaconda-smile.html), or _In the mood for love_ which [people](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/13/100-best-films-movies-of-the-21st-century) [often](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_considered_the_best) enjoy a lot. Which seems like it shouldn’t be a problem, as long as I find something to enjoy in them. But it also seems like I would be seriously missing something if I was buying bags of coffee all these years just to appreciate the thick, substantive quality of the paper bag between my teeth as I chewed it. How many of my enjoyments are like this?
# Why is loss of muscle cells not considered one of the hallmarks of aging?

When muscles go in adults it's due to individual muscle cells getting bigger and not due to increase in muscle cells. It's [generally believed](https://biology.stackexchange.com/a/23885/152) that no new muscle cells get produced in human adults. Sometimes muscle cells die. I would expect that as humans age therefore the count of muscle cells will go down. There are frequently claims that there's a limited number of hallmarks of aging that if repaired would stop aging. Neither SENS list nor the [2013 paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/) seem to include muscle cell count as one mark of aging. Is there a good reason for this?
# The National Defense Authorization Act Contains AI Provisions

A bunch of laws about AI were recently passed by Congress in the US.

[The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization_Act) is the law which funds and organizes the Department of Defense of the United States. A new version of the law is passed periodically. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, it is one of a few bills which are considered "must pass" and therefore contain a lot of supplemental legislation, lately including action on COVID-19.

Hidden in the bill are AI provisions, both within the Department of Defense and for civilian agencies. There is a [summary of the relevant sections](https://hai.stanford.edu/policy/policy-resources/summary-ai-provisions-national-defense-authorization-act-2021) provided by the Institute for Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) at Stanford. There is an even shorter summary, bullet-point style, at [Import AI](https://jack-clark.net/2020/12/21/import-ai-228-alibaba-uses-ai-to-spot-knockoff-brands-china-might-encode-military-messages-into-synthetic-whale-songs-what-36-experts-think-is-needed-for-fair-ai-in-india/) which is where I got the information.

It is primarily a matter of bureaucratic assignments: different offices and/or agencies are directed to produce reports describing their impacts; new committees are formed; the mandate for existing agencies/committees are expanded to include new facets of AI. The best news is that it includes one provision for ethics, including safety, but I remind everyone that these are in the generic sense of the term which includes uses and capability of machine learning rather than a focus on AGI. So think robots working alongside humans and error margins on deep learning target assessments rather than value alignment.

I will break each item from HAI's summary into a separate comment below, so we can discuss them individually. The ones beginning with CIV are civilian, and with DOD are Department of Defense.
# DALL-E by OpenAI

This is a linkpost for [https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/](https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/)

My own take: Cool, not super surprising given GPT-3 and Image GPT. I look forward to seeing what a bigger version of this would do, so that we could get a sense of how much it improves with scale. I'm especially interested in the raven's progressive matrices performance.
# 2019 Review Coworking Party [Wed 7pm PT]

There's one more week left in The Review Phase of the LW 2019 Review. After that, we start voting.

Have you been vaguely meaning to do some reviewing but not got around to it? Are you a little intimidated with how to get started but could use a fun social event to help get going?

I'd personally like to allocate at least one more evening towards reviewing a bunch of post. I thought it'd be nice if we got to work alongside each other, chatting on pomodoro breaks. At the beginning, I'll help out people who could use some guidance. People who already have gotten their Review Ball rolling will be free to get started.

At the end, we'll have have a longer chat about how various 2019 posts fit into the broader trajectory of LessWrong's intellectual output.

Come by the Walled Garden's Cabin if you'd like to join me.

**Invite Link:**

[http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=Lvrc&event=lw-2019-review-coworking](http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=Lvrc&event=lw-2019-review-coworking)

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/095139b11d41102bb260678dc159607642054ccfc069cb50.png)
# Linguistic Freedom

One of the first things you notice when you start digging into the definitions of words is that they are much more ambiguous than they seem. Chairs are an excellent example as at first glance they don't seem ambiguous at all. But then, what if we ask if a tree stump is a chair if someone sits on it? This puzzle won't be a challenge for longtime readers of Less Wrong, as they should already understand that [the map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/the-map-is-not-the-territory). That is "chair" is a word created by humans and which exists for our purposes and for which we get to decide the convention. It's definition is not a fact written in the universe, waiting to be discovered.

I've started using the term Linguistic Freedom to refer to this use specifically, since just saying "The Map is Not the Territory" is somewhat ambiguous and also somewhat difficult to explain. On the first point, if you look at the post where Elizier describes the skill [The Map Is Not the Territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJ9MFBPwXGwNpadf2/skill-the-map-is-not-the-territory), rather than talking about linguistic freedom, he talks about the potential of being wrong, epistemic humility and how beliefs are separate from reality. On the second, instead of just saying, "Words are created by humans for our purposes and so we get to decide if a treestump we sit on counts as a chair, it isn't written into the universe", while if we want to explain the "Map and Territory" we have to explain the map AND the territory AND then how it applies to language.

Anyway, all I mean by this is that we have the freedom to use language however we want, even if it is stupid. For example, we could use "chair" to mean "pineapples" and that would just be stupid rather than wrong. But what do we mean by stupid? One simple way of characterising this would be to note that the territory contains certain [natural structures](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/peCFP4zGowfe7Xccz/natural-structures-and-conditional-definitions) that cry out for a name and that a definition is "stupid" when the term was created in order to refer to some way of drawing boundaries around a particular natural structure, but we decide to ignore this.

Linguistic freedom is about conventions, not individual uses of language. It doesn't mean that I can start using "chair" to mean "pineapple" without telling anyone. It doesn't mean that if you ask "Do chairs typically have four legs?" that I can answer as though you asked about pineapples. I suppose we do have that kind of linguistic freedom to be stupid in that way as well, but that isn't the kind of freedom that I'm referring to. It also doesn't refer to any kind of subjectivism or anti-realism or notion that everything is just language games.

This sequence will argue that this principle applies far more widely than you might think; that is many unexpected things are actually part of the map.
# Centrally planned war

We watched _Dunkirk_, and wondered how many military deaths are for reasons more of logistics than of facing the enemy. Probably lots - we have heard that war is made of colossal logistical feats, so probably they often fail, and often lives depend on them.

(Imagine organizing a party with hundreds of thousands of people at it. Imagine that is located in an overseas country, where you don’t have a house, and everyone hates you. Imagine that it goes for several years. Imagine it is a very stressful party for the partygoers, but also you are counting on them to carry out some hard and terrifying tasks for you during the party. Imagine you anticipate many deaths during the proceedings.)

Which made me wonder, why is war so centrally planned? Why wouldn’t all these logistical details be simpler and cheaper in the usual ways if each soldier looked after himself mostly? Similar to how it works better for each person to look after themselves during peacetime, rather than having commanders organize and dictate the whole peaceful existence effort. Thoughts?
# Austin Meetup: Caplan and Hanson

This part of our return to in-person meetups, now once per month. As per the health recommendations, we will maintain social distancing. Please finish food and drinks before coming. And wear a mask.  
  
This time, we might be joined by Robin Hanson (of [Overcoming Bias](https://overcomingbias.com/) fame) and/or Bryan Caplan (of [Econlog](http://econlog.econlib.org/) fame) (both of [GMU](https://economics.gmu.edu/) fame). So I thought we would use this time to discuss our favorite ideas from these two minds. For a quick recap, Hanson is known for (though I can't do him justice here):  
 

*   [Futarchy](http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html) ("vote on values, bet on beliefs") and advocacy of [greater user of prediction markets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market)
*   [The future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Em) of [whole-brain emulations](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/whole-brain-emulation)
*   [Rational agents shouldn't agree to disagree](http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/deceive.pdf).

And Caplan is known for (much more in addition to):

*   [The Myth of the Rational Voter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter) (that democracies choose bad policies because of voter irrationality rather than just ignorance)
*   [Open borders advocacy](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/12/open_borders_me_2.html)
*   [the signaling model of education](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/02/is_education_wo.html) (higher education mainly signals pre-existing abilities rather than improving human capital; [book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education))

\*\*\*

The meetup is at Central Market, 4001 N. Lamar, in the park area, near the stone tables by the pond. Please wear masks and finish food and drinks before congregating. Look for the LW and SSC signs. People start arriving at 1:30 pm, and the main activity will begin at 2:30 pm.
# What's up with the Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) trial?

It seems that the [official website](https://www.afar.org/tame-trial) of the trial suggest that they are sill seeking donations to start the trial. On the other hand, it's [reported](https://www.longevity.technology/worlds-first-anti-aging-trial-gets-green-light/) in 2019 that they raised the necessary 75$ million to start the trial:

> After closing the final $40m of its required $75m budget with a donation from a private source, the first drug trial directly targeting aging is set to begin at the end of this year, lead researcher Dr Nir Barzilai has revealed in an exclusive interview with Longevity.Technology.

I can't find any trial registration that the trial is started. What's up here? Did someone disappear with the money?
# Weekend Review Bash: Guided review writing, Forecasting and co-working, in EU and US times

This is the final weekend of the review phase of the [LessWrong 2019 Review](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QFBEjjAvT6KbaA3dY/the-lesswrong-2019-review). There's been more than 100 reviews written; but more than 60 posts are still unreviewed. Let's go out with a bang before we start voting!

To help you to join the review effort, we have a few virtual sessions lined up this weekend:

**Guided review writing**

You pick an essay. You get some time to read it. Then I'll walk you through a set of guided prompts and exercises to help you form an opinion about it. Finally you'll get some time to write-up your thoughts and, if you're happy with them, post them on the site. 

**Review Forecasting**

Before the session I have turned 10-20 claims from review posts into forecasting questions or binary polls. In the session we'll discuss and put probabilities on them together. 

A rapid-fire way of getting lots of data about review claims (as opposed to the traditional, more in-depth reviews). 

**Review co-working**

Do pomodoros together with other reviewers. Discuss any things that come up in the breaks. 

Great if you already know what you want to get done, but would like some company or social accountability while doing it. 

(Please note this is *not* an ordinary co-working session, where you can work on anything you like. It's only for contributing to the LessWrong 2019 Review.) 

Location
--------

LessWrong Walled Garden, main cabin.

Join [here](http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=5nRT&event=sunday-review-bash).   

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/d86b3f3cc3a68ab0e1ee0b177e1e64d3119d19d2908ad033.png)

Schedule
--------

SATURDAY

*11am PST / 20:00 CET :* (1h)  Review Forecasting

*12pm PST / 21:00 CET :* (2h) Guided review writing & Review co-working

*6pm-8pm PST:* (2h) Review co-working

SUNDAY

*11am PST / 20:00 CET :* (1h) Review Forecasting

*12pm PST / 21:00 CET :* (2h) Guided review writing & Review co-working

*6pm-8pm PST:* (2h) Review co-working

RSVP
----

[Link to Facebook Event](https://www.facebook.com/events/4197489903595641)[.](https://www.facebook.com/events/4197489903595641?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22extra_data%22%3A%22%22%2C%22mechanism%22%3A%22surface%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22edit_dialog%22%7D%2C%7B%22extra_data%22%3A%22%22%2C%22mechanism%22%3A%22surface%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22permalink%22%7D%2C%7B%22extra_data%22%3A%22%22%2C%22mechanism%22%3A%22surface%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22edit_dialog%22%7D]%7D)

Elicit Prediction ([elicit.org/binary/questions/mOjqegne-](elicit.org/binary/questions/mOjqegne-))

Elicit Prediction ([elicit.org/binary/questions/DwIGCb9SV](elicit.org/binary/questions/DwIGCb9SV))

Elicit Prediction ([elicit.org/binary/questions/QxkRzZm5A](elicit.org/binary/questions/QxkRzZm5A))
# What currents of thought on LessWrong do you want to see distilled?

The question is inspired by a few comments and a question I have seen recently. The first is a [discussion in the 2019 Review](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QFBEjjAvT6KbaA3dY/the-lesswrong-2019-review?commentId=AtaBeitpM4Gh3wJYS) post on the subject of research debt; the second a question from johnswentworth [asking what people's confusions are about simulacra](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z996vmMDp64DveLpQ/what-confusions-do-people-have-about-simulacrum-levels) (which I interpret to be a 'what do you want from this distillation' question).

The question is what it says in the title, but I would like to add that there is no expiration. For example, I recently saw cryogenics back in the posts and questions, which had fallen off the activity radar for years. So old currents of thought are valid candidates, even if the real goal is a re-distillation in light of new developments in the field or all the accumulated communication technique we've considered on LessWrong.

So please describe the current of thought, and your reason for wanting a distillation. The authors may be called to action, or alternatively following [Bridgett Kay's suggestion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QFBEjjAvT6KbaA3dY/the-lesswrong-2019-review?commentId=vZZeArnmjPH2wNa9R) someone else may take up the challenge.
# Babble Thread

On LessWrong, we have a sort of hierarchy of posts:

1.  Curated
2.  Front Page
3.  Personal Blog
4.  Open Thread / Short Form

Here I'd like to experiment with a fifth: the Babble Thread.

What is babbling? [Babble](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pC6DYFLPMTCbEwH8W/p/i42Dfoh4HtsCAfXxL) is the post that introduced the concept, I believe. The [Babble and Prune](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/babble-and-prune) tag is also worth checking out. But for me, seeing the [Babble Challenges](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H4osJjCGzo9LjLXa2/final-babble-challenge-for-now-100-ways-to-light-a-candle) as a concrete example is what made the concept click.

* * *

In this thread... babble away! About anything! Share your ideas, and don't hold back! It's ok if they end up being wrong or silly. The purpose here is just to babble. Some ideas for what to babble about:

*   Important problems like AI safety
*   Useful things like life hacks
*   World modeling, like how efficient you think the market for prestige in academia is
*   Reflections on your personal life
*   Trivial things like how hard it is to tuck your bed sheets in properly
*   Ideas for startups or scientific experiments

To this end, I think it'd make sense to avoid commenting on others' babbles. It seems best to make this more of a safe space where you can babble without fear of being judged.

However, pruning does have a place too. I think a good balance would be to allow upvoting on top-level comments (babbles) as a means to do some initial pruning and identify ideas worth following up on for further pruning. If we want to be really strict about it I think we'd separate this upvote/initial pruning step from the generate ideas/babble step, but as a practical matter it'd be easier to upvote in this thread.

I'm not attached to this approach by any means, so please comment in the [top level meta comment](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s2zyQ4Somk6LynCQj/babble-thread?commentId=Jmfz3C76ohyPz8hHM) if you have thoughts on how this Babble Thread should be structured.
# What to do if you can't form any habits whatsoever?

A lot of LW posts are about making habits and routines, whether it's TAPs, making to-do lists or checklists automatic, overcoming akrasia, becoming more productive, or more. 

As for me, I have ADHD and ASD. I don't think I've ever been able to form automatic habits or routines, including ones I did daily, such as brushing my teeth or taking a shower. I don't eat or sleep at a set time, and was never able to consistently go to uni or work.

Is anyone here similar? What do you guys do, and do you have any tips to help with that?
# How should you go about valuing your time?

How much is your time worth? $5/hr? $10? $30? $100? [$1,000?](https://blog.asmartbear.com/value-time.html)

Whenever I ask myself that question, I notice that I am confused. Suppose you are some sort of consultant where you can sign on to some website and choose to work 1 hour and make $100 whenever you want. In that case, I can see why it'd make sense to say that your time is worth $100/hr. Instead of spending one hour cleaning your home, it would make more sense to do your consulting for one hour, make $100, hire a cleaning person to do it for $40, get your house cleaned, and have $60 left over.

But most people don't have that option. Most people don't really have any option to work more hours and make more money. And even if you are a freelancer or a consultant, gigs take time to find and are usually commitments on the order of months, not hours. So then, the above logic doesn't apply.

So maybe the question just needs to be reworded. Instead of "how much is your time *worth*", "how much do you *choose to value* your time".

Do you value your time at $1/hr? No. I think most people would pay $1 to gain one hour of extra time. Do you value it at $1,000/hr? No, I think most people would trade one hour for $1,000. So $1/hr is a lower bound and $1,000/hr is an upper bound. Continue to ask such questions and there'll be an answer. Or at least a revealed preference (hypothetically).

Then how do you decide how much to choose to value your time? I guess it depends on how much money you have. If you're tight on cash, you wouldn't want to use up your limited money to purchase more time, because you have bills to pay, for instance. But if you have a lot of disposable income, trading that money for time might be something that you want to do. Still, with that said, I don't feel like I have a good idea of how much I should value my own time, as a programmer in a normal programming job. I could see anywhere from $10/hr to $100/hr, and perhaps even outside of that range.
# The time I got really into poker

One time I decided it would be good to learn to play poker. I had probably learned to play some form of poker a couple of other times before, and forgotten. One way to play a game a lot is to play it with a computer rather than other people. An iPad turns Agricola from one of the slowest games that casual board gamers might still be bothered to play to something you can play a few quick rounds of over lunch. I downloaded some kind of poker app, and began. It was maybe 9pm, and I was maybe sitting on my bed, in maybe Berkeley. My memories are pretty unclear. The app was green I think, like some kind of casino table.

In the app there were a series of tables with increasing stakes. The first one was ‘your grandmother’s table’ or something, at which you needed almost no money to play, and were given a lot of advice about what to do. If you won several games there, you could afford a single game at the next table up, and so on. If you lost enough that you could no longer buy in at your higher table, you would drop down, and if you could no longer afford grandmother’s, then you could transfer American dollars to the app-maker in exchange for more fake poker money, and keep going.

I got the hang of the rules and began to play fast. And I got the hang of not losing and bought my way into higher tables. I played faster. I didn’t pause. The ends of games got the same reflexive flash of choice as any other part of the game. Time passed, and lots and lots of games. My mind started to wander, even while I played. It wandered to a memory of long ago, more vivid and detailed than memories that come when I call for them. How strange. I played very fast. And more memories appeared, intense against the smooth background of mindless poker. I don’t usually remember things for pleasure—recollection is a neutral activity, if not about something particularly upsetting or nice. But these were somehow pleasing. Not because they were about anything that would usually inspire happiness—they were mundane scenes, like a road that I crossed once to get to a gas station, and the look of the gas station, and the feeling of the sky and the car and the other passenger waiting and the afternoon (not a real example necessarily; I forget all of the particulars now)—but in their mere pungent existence, they felt somehow satisfying. I drifted between them and frantic yet peaceful poker. Hours passed. I often wondered what I had just done—what cards I had played, or why—and realized that I had no explicit recollection. More hours passed, and more scenes from younger years projected fragrantly into the flickering virtual cards. I don’t think I consciously explored the strange mental landscape, transfixed as I was by the irresistible torrent of poker moves to be made. I took action after action definitively, yet lived dreamlike above it. After nine hours, with morning beginning to establish itself, I stopped.
# Base rate of RCT from developing countries finding unexpected effects 

The last few months I have been stumbling onto RCTs conducted in developing countries, with  great results in treating Covid-19.  The evaluated treatments seem apriori unlikely to generate these great results, e.g. this [gargling study](http://www.bioresearchcommunications.com/index.php/brc/article/view/176/159?fbclid=IwAR01fumHOtchrjHELTsdreHMxMKHtqn7UCPjVA3fqgm5kUo5iY1NewTLk-8) from Bangladesh, or this [honey+black cumin seeds study](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.30.20217364v4.full.pdf) from Pakistan, or [Bromhexine from Iran](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7502909/) all have results that would revolutionary-if-true. FWIW, and on the face of it, none of them can be described as garbage (decent sample size, randomized, p- preregistered for the Pakistani study, etc.)

This question however is *not* about these particular studies, but which base rate I should be using to evaluate such studies. I am coming up empty with prior instances of clinical trials from developing countries with promising results, good sample sizes but which later turned out to be false. Does anybody know of examples or can recommend search terms?
# Zen and Rationality: Karma

*This is post 6/? about the intersection of my decades of LW-style rationality practice and my several years of Zen practice.*

*In today's installment, I look at karma from a rationalist perspective.*

Karma is one of those ideas that is poorly understood both because it means different things in different contexts and because there's a simple but bad [abstraction](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/ehnG4mseKF6xALmQy/p/vDGvHBDuMtcPd8Lks) of the idea that's easily understood and shared but points to something other than what we mean by "karma" in Zen, thus leading to [bucket errors](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/bucket-errors).

So, first, what is karma not. The Zen notion of karma is not any of the related ideas also called "karma" present in other dharmic traditions. It's also not the New Age or Theosophy notion of karma. All of these you are probably familiar with and might be expressed in one of the following ways:

*   what you give is what you get
*   the world will punish you for your bad acts and reward you for your good acts
*   you'll be rewarded/punished in proportion to your acts in this life via the quality of your rebirth into a next life
*   karma is a "sin debt" you carry forward, possibly from past lives, that you must work off to have a better life

In Zen (and some other Buddhist traditions), karma is nothing so involved. Instead, you can just read it as "[causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/causality)" and you'll be 80% of the way of understanding it, with the remaining 20% [some subtlety around how causal relationships relate to the fundamental flowing of one moment into the next](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RMBMf85gGYytvYGBv/no-causation-without-reification) that come from [understanding how map and territory relate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EReZtCsGg2giRTZP3/zen-and-rationality-map-and-territory).

As you might guess, the other notions of karma relate to this one as heuristics about how earlier moments affect later ones. For example, the thread of moments out of which a person can be identified contain within them all the causes of the person's present condition, and it's often true that if you behave prosocially towards others they'll behave prosocially towards you, so a reasonable compression of karma that skips all the finer points look a lot like "if you do good stuff, good stuff will happen to you; if you do bad stuff, bad stuff will happen to you". Mix in some beliefs about reincarnation and you have karma as it is commonly encountered, [bucket errors](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/bucket-errors) and all.
# What’s good about haikus?

Fiction often asks its readers to get through a whole list of evocative scenery to imagine before telling them anything about the situation that might induce an interest in what the fields and the flies looked like, or what color stuff was. I assume that this is fun if you are somehow more sophisticated than me, but I admit that I don’t enjoy it (yet).

I am well capable of enjoying actual disconnected scenery. But imagining is effort, so the immediate action of staring at the wall, say, seems like a better deal than having to imagine someone else’s wall to be staring at. Plus, a wall is already straining my visual-imaginative capacities, and there are probably going to be all kinds of other things, and some of them are probably going to be called exotic words to hammer in whatever kind of scenic je ne sais quoi is going to come in handy later in the book, so I’m going to have to look them up or think about it while I keep from forgetting the half-built mental panorama constructed so far. It’s a chore.

My boyfriend and I have recently got into reading haikus together. They mostly describe what things look like a bit, and then end. So you might think I would dislike them even more than the descriptive outsets of longer stories. But actually I ask to read them together every night.

I think part of it is just volume. The details of a single glance, rather than a whole landscape survey, I can take in. And combined with my own prior knowledge of the subject, it can be a rich picture. And maybe it is just that I am paying attention to them in a better way, but it seems like the details chosen to bring into focus are better. Haikus are like a three stroke drawing that captures real essence of the subject. My boyfriend also thinks there is often something clean about the images.

Some by Matsuo Bashō from our book The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass:

In the fish shop the gums of the salt-bream look cold

Early fall— The sea and the rice fields all one green.

Another year gone— hat in my hand, sandals on my feet.

More than ever I want to see in these blossoms at dawn the god’s face.

The peasant’s child, husking rice, stops and gazes at the moon.

Year after year On the monkey’s face A monkey face

In sum:

Ten words Draw on my mind Cleaner than fifty lines
# Thunderdome and Review Co-Voting (Meetup Sunday 12pm PT)

This Sunday at noon, we’ll have a two-part event, we’ll have a two part event:

**1\. Thunderdome talks! (12pm PT)**

Is there a post up for the 2019 Review which you think is likely to be under or overrated, which you have strong feelings about? Are there posts that you're *confused* about, and want to lay out that confusion concretely and see how people respond? 

Comment below to sign up for a short talk (no more than 5 minutes), either advocating for it, or explaining why it’s wrong/misleading/overrated, or spelling out your confusions about it.

Or, if you see someone commenting below who is planning to argue for/against a post you have different beliefs about, sign up to argue the counterpoint.

Depending on how much interest we get, I may prioritize thunderdome talks based on the karma of the comments below.

**2\. Voting UI Help / Coworking (1:00pm PT, or whenever Thunderdome Talks are done)**

If you’d like to vote, but feeling kinda intimidated by it, 1pm Sunday will be a good time to get oriented. I’ll walk you through the basic steps of how-to-vote, with some suggestions on how to prioritize.

Then we’ll do a couple pomodoro-timers of vote coworking. Folk who want to work quietly can do that while checking in every 25 minutes. Folk who want to chat about posts they’re confused about can do that.

We’ll be meeting in the Walled Garden. Invite link:

[http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=H3XI&event=review-voting-thunderdome-coworking](http://garden.lesswrong.com?code=H3XI&event=review-voting-thunderdome-coworking)
# The Great Karma Reckoning

Today the LessWrong team ran a script that recalculated the scores and karma of all posts, comments, tags and users based on the complete vote history. This has resulted in very substantial changes to all the karma scores on the site. Here are the biggest changes: 

*   We removed the historical 10x multiplier for posts that were promoted to main on LW 1.0
*   This reversed the effect of a lot of voting-related bugs we had over the past few years
*   This reverts the period in early 2018 where all votes were as strong as current strong-votes are, which resulted in very large karma inflation during that time
*   All votes from before the new voting system with weak- and strong-votes are treated as weak-votes, but do now scale proportional to your karma (so a good number of 1-strength votes were converted to 2-strength votes)
    *   You are welcome to strong-upvote posts that you voted on before strong-votes existed, if you want to give them a bit of a boost.

We've been planning on doing this for a long time, mostly to make historical comparisons of the scores of different posts easier and also have more confidence that current karma balances are not the result of bugs we fixed many months ago. 

For the purpose of the 2019 review, you will be counted in the 1000+ vote bracket if you either had 1000+ karma before we ran todays migration, or if you just hit that target after today's migration. So nobody should suddenly be negatively surprised about their ability to participate in the vote.
# How to solve the argument about what the algorithm should do

Should YouTube's algorithm recommend conspiracy theory videos? Should twitter recommend tweets that disagree with the WHO? Should Facebook recommend things that'll make you angry?

There's countless such questions about recommender algorithms, usually with good arguments on both sides.

But the elephant in the room that all these arguments take place in, is that the problem isn't so much how to design the algorithm, but **why do we only have one choice?**

My suggestion is that sites with recommender algorithms will have a system that lets everyone write their own algorithm, upload it, and use it instead of the companies algorithm, or use an algorithm uploaded by someone else.

The algorithms would be selected through an add-on-shop-like interface, and could have further options for the users to tweak through a UI.

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/7ef76f5c5c1b5e1ed1024e5bc61faada1112bbca2500f7d1.png)

Here's an example of Google's add-on marketplace. imagine something similar but for algorithms.

This will move the argument from "How should the one algorithm be designed", to the much easier problem of just designing an algorithm you're happy with and uploading it, or finding one that was already uploaded.

When it comes to large companies like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, etc. I would force them to implement such a system, and use a simple no-filter chronological order algorithm in their feeds as a default (then offer their own algorithm as one choice among the other choices).

With everyone able to choose their own algorithms, we'll be one step closer to a social media landscape that works.
# Deconditioning Aversion to Dislike

It doesn't matter who dislikes me. It doesn't matter who hates me. It doesn't even matter who likes me. All that matters is how many people love me because I live under the rule of law in a city where the people I have the potential to interact with vastly outnumber the people I have the time to interact with.

In my [previous post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJrpCJshBoaY6YS4L/overconfidence) on the virtue of pompous egotistical overconfidence, rmoehn [pointed out](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJrpCJshBoaY6YS4L/overconfidence?commentId=W3CpAuHNPn59tRctf) that my "[c]ocky arrogant megalomaniac behavior makes the liking scale swing positive in some people, negative in others." Extreme variance is advantageous because the number of people who love me is all that matters. If I put off some people in the process then that's a bonus because I don't have to expend my own attention triaging them.

Your weirdness should scale with the size of your audience. If you are in a room with three other people then acting out will often alienate them. If you are on the Internet then it is hard to gather attention at all without great creativity.

A side-effect of ostentatious weirdness is it triggers lots of dislike. If everyone dislikes you then that is a problem. But if at least a small number of people like you—and you like them back—then you have calibrated properly.

I am irrational because I care when people dislike me. I let strangers influence my behavior even though I shouldn't. I want to decondition this reaction. The simplest way is to expose myself to situations where people dislike me for acting genuine.
- Blogging helps.
- Entrepreneurship helps.
- Fastidious truth-telling helps.
- Cutting ties with toxic people gets easier every time.

I am told YouTube comments are a cesspool of hate. Maybe if I post videos they can help me become stronger.
# Meditative thinking

I got fairly into meditation in 2018. Not in a way where you do a huge amount of meditation, or seek guidance on how to do meditation well, or on whether what you are doing is meditation at all. I don’t think I even graduated from doing meditation largely in five minute bouts. I just really dug a set of mental things which seemed related to meditation. I was riding an ethos. I suppose meditation was a particularly namable point in the space, but not obviously the most exciting part of it, so I ended up being pretty excited about ‘meditation…?’ while not actually meditating that much.

I also remained so ignorant about meditation traditions and previous human meditation experience that you might doubt that I’m talking about the same thing. (I did talk to other people a little, and did about five guided meditations, which seemed like a different kind of thing anyway, but also very awesome.)

With that said, here’s a kind of meditation I made up. I call it, ‘meditative thinking’. In it, you do all the stuff you would usually do while meditating: be in a meditation-conducive position (I do lying on my back, which I hear is a bad idea, but it is very comfy); set a meditation timer with bells at the start and end (mine also makes water sounds between them, but this probably isn’t crucial); close your eyes; be aware of your breathing; then just go on being aware of stuff in a conspicuously conscious way. But before all this, choose a question to think about. And then, once meditating, think about the question. Maintain the same mental stance as you normally would meditating, insofar as that makes sense. Be aware of your breathing, and your awareness, and your thinking. If you stop thinking about the question, gently bring your awareness back to it.

I still find this good. Though it’s possible that it gets much of its benefit from being a ritualistic way to actually think about a question for five or ten minutes without reflexively opening Facebook because thinking doesn’t correspond to a tab or occupy one’s hands.
# How do I improve at being strategic?

After reading [Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBRWb2Em5SNeWYwwB/humans-are-not-automatically-strategic) I realized I am not very strategic, and I want to improve. As practice I'm been using the recipe for strategic planning from that post to create a strategy to become more strategic. Specifically, creating a system or framework for forming strategies.   
  
That said, I'm new to LW and do not have rigorous science or math training, so perhaps strategy is background knowledge here? I've found little info on this topic on LW.  Most of which is tactical not strategic. Have I missed something? It seems like training in strategy would be an extremely useful framework to hang all these instrumental rationality techniques from.
# Wuwei

*Wuwei* (kanji: 無為, simplified: 无为, pinyin: wúwéi, hiragana: むい) denotes a political philosophy and a state of mind.

*Wuwei* combines *wu* 無 and *wei* 為. *Wu* is straightforward to translate. *Wu* means "don't" or "without". *Wei* is not straightforward to translate. I like to think of *wei* as "action" or "intention". The CC-CEDICT project defines *wei* in terms of performing a capacity. That is, to become by doing *i.e.* to take a role.

> 為 为 [wei2] /as (in the capacity of)/to take sth as/to act as/to serve as/to behave as/to become/to be/to do/by (in the passive voice)/
>
> ―[CC-CEDICT](https://cc-cedict.org/wiki/)

# Political Philosophy

The political philosophy of *wuwei* can be crudely translated into "self-government".

## The Emperor

In eastern political philosophy, the emperor is above running the government. The actual job of running the government is his ministers' responsibility. If anything goes wrong then it is the ministers' fault. If the emperor does make a proclamation then it should be vague and abstract. If things go right then it is due to the emperor's wise leadership. If things go wrong then it is the fault of corrupt incompetant bureaucrats. The emperor leads indirectly, by setting a example of model behavior.

## The Shogun

"I will punish the bird if it does not sing," said Nobunaga.

"I will reward the bird it it does sing," said Hideyoshi.

Tokugawa waited for the bird to sing.

# State of Mind

The *wuwei* state of mind is analogous to *wuwei* statecraft. It is the idea that the best way to act is by letting yourself act instead of compelling yourself to act.
- I put almost no effort into actually doing things. If I [keep away from](https://www.lsusr.com/blog/2021-media.html) time-wasting activities then I do worthwhile things by default.
- In Zen, you attain enlightenment by default simply by not doing anything else.
# How can I find trustworthy dietary advice?

I currently think that the official dietary advice is sometimes untrustworthy, and I don't know when it's trustworthy and when it isn't, so I'm in a state of epistemic learned helplessness. Some reasons why I think this:

--I get the impression that much of the official advice of the past was actively harmful; the official advice has flip-flopped on many things over the past decades; things which were touted as healthy were later shown to be unhealthy, and vice versa. So presumably some of the current official advice is also actively harmful, and some of it is merely useless. But I don't know which.

--I get the impression that there are studies available supporting pretty much any conclusion; if I want to believe that red meat is bad for me, I can find mountains of studies showing that it is bad for me, and if I want to believe that it is good for me, I can go talk to carnivore diet people and they'll give me convincing evidence it's actually really good for me.

I'm optimistic that if I spent a few weeks of effort looking into the literature and reading the studies myself I could come to good opinions on this topic. But maybe someone here has already done this? Or maybe I'm just wrong about the official dietary advice?