Harley-ml/lesswrong huggingface dataset:
# Balancing Audio in Software

A few months ago I [ported](https://www.jefftk.com/p/whistle-synth-pi) my whistle controlled synthesizer to the Raspberry Pi. I configured it with mono output, and ran it through a [DI box](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DI_unit) to get a balanced XLR output I could send to a sound board. I realized a few weeks ago, however, that I don't actually need a DI box, and I can balance the audio in software. Now that I've [made the change](https://github.com/jeffkaufman/whistle-synth/commit/f832852cc4f545af02874e358e75bc7018f19dc7) I wanted to write about how it works.

To send an audio signal, you need two conductors: the signal and a reference (ground):

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/unbalanced-signal.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/unbalanced-signal-big.png)

This works fine, unless you get radio frequency interference. There's energy in the air, from intentional broadcasts or noisy devices, and the weaker your signal or longer your cable the more it will shift the signal:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/unbalanced-interference.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/unbalanced-interference-big.png)

There are a few different technical solutions, but the most common one in audio is to use a balanced signal. In addition to our signal, we add and "anti-signal" which is the same signal but reversed:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/balanced-signal.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/balanced-signal-big.png)

Instead of interpreting the signal relative to ground, we now interpret it relative to the anti-signal. Absolute magnitude is unimportant, what matters is the delta. Now when we get interference, it still shifts our signal, but it makes an almost identical change to our anti-signal, and the difference between the two signals is almost unchanged:

[![](https://www.jefftk.com/balanced-interference.png)](https://www.jefftk.com/balanced-interference-big.png)

Normally you create the anti-signal with a transformer, in a DI box, but my software already has access to stereo output. If I want to send X, I can write X to the left channel and -X to the right. With a 3.5mm to 1/4" TRS cable I can be as far as I need to be from the board without worrying about interference.

(Do be careful not to use a 3.5mm to XLR cable: you need to connect to the mixer's "line" and not "mic" input. The latter often will provide "phantom power", which is designed to feed microphones power backwards, through their output. The soundboard provides +48V to both the signal and anti-signal pins, relative to ground. This could break your sound card, since that's a lot of voltage to some thing that was probably not designed to receive it. You might think you could turn off phantom power on inputs that don't need it, but on the (cheaper) mixers you would typically see at a contra dance or bar there is typically one switch for the entire board.)

*Comment via: [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/10100245208941152)*
# Sabotage challenge

You are an ordinary citizen in a hypothetical, imaginary Evil Empire that wages an aggressive war against its neighbor. Telling the truth about the war can get you imprisoned, protesting can get you fined or imprisoned. What can you do to impede your country's war effort?

Unlike the usuall bubble challenge, feel free to post any number of ideas you have,  criticize and improve on other's ideas. It says "sabotage" in the title, but useful ideas which don't fall under that category are also welcome.
# Is there a good solution for documents that need to be signed with a ballpoint pen under suicide watch?

In Scott Alexander's article about his [IRB nightmare,](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/) he writes that one of the problems he faced is that the rules both said that documents have to be signed by ballpoint pen and that the involved patients are only allowed to use pencils. 

Politically, there seems to be a similar issue in the case of [Joshua Schulte who's imprisoned under poor conditions by the US](https://pix11.com/news/national-news/ex-cia-engineer-in-wikileaks-case-says-hes-incarcerated-like-an-animal/) and who's complained were rejected because they were not filled out with a ballpoint pen when he was also not being able to use ballpoint pens due to being under suicide watch rules. 

Is there any way to construct a pencil to fulfill the legal criteria that would allow its use in those cases?
# Prediction Market News/Ticker?

Lately I’ve been finding myself wanting a way to track how prediction markets have been changing with time. Some markets are pretty stable, while others drift from week to week or even swing violently. These trends feel like relevant news that I want as part of my information diet.

 Are there any good aggregators, feeds, tools, etc. that already do this? I read Zvi and ACX, but neither are broad/regular/systematic enough in their market commentary to have me satisfied.
# Will Russia default, and if so, will it lead to financial crisis?

I live in South Korea. Apart from threat of nuclear war, which seems low so far, the primary impact of Ukraine war seems to be potential default of Russia and its possibility to lead to financial crisis.

"Will Russia default?" is a rare question with a liquid real money prediction market, called CDS(credit default swap). [Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-07/russia-swaps-signal-80-chance-of-default-on-ruble-payout-decree) claims the market implies 80% chance of default. Sadly I don't know how to do that computation myself, so please tell us if you can explain it step by step.

Russia defaulted in 1998. As I understand, it led to collapse of LTCM and almost led to financial crisis, akin to bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and Global Financial Crisis. In 1998, crisis was averted by bailout organized by Federal Reserve, but we may not be as lucky this time, as we weren't in 2008. I hope financial industry advanced in terms of risk management since 1998 and 2008, but in fact don't know whether it did. If you know, please tell us.
# It Looks Like You're Trying To Take Over The World

*This story was originally posted as a response to* [*this thread*](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DuPEzGJ5oscqxD5oh/shah-and-yudkowsky-on-alignment-failures?commentId=hjd7Z4AN6ToN2ebSm)*.*

*It might help to imagine a hard takeoff scenario using only known sorts of NN &* [*scaling effects*](https://www.gwern.net/notes/Scaling)*...*

> In A.D. 20XX. Work was beginning.  "How are you gentlemen *!!*"... (Work. Work never changes; work is always hell.)
>
> Specifically, a MoogleBook researcher has gotten a pull request from Reviewer #2 on his new paper in evolutionary search in auto-ML, for error bars on the auto-ML hyperparameter sensitivity like [larger batch sizes](https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis#blessings-of-scale), because [more can be different](https://cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf) and there's high variance in the old runs with a few [anomalously high](https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt) performance values.  ("Really? *Really*? That's what you're worried about?") He can't [see](https://www.gwern.net/Unseeing#confirmation-bias) why worry, and wonders what sins he committed to deserve this asshole Chinese (given the Engrish) reviewer, as he wearily kicks off yet another HQU experiment...

[**Rest of story moved to gwern.net.**](https://www.gwern.net/Clippy)
# Being Moral is an end goal.

Alice wants to go to her best friends party. She has a sore throat, and she usually takes a COVID test when she has a sore throat. But if the test were to come out positive she would feel like she shouldn't go, and she really really wants to go. Solution - she avoids taking the test, leaving her probably COVID free, and ready to party.

I've heard this story in about a thousand variations since COVID restrictions began.

Analysed from a rational perspective this doesn't seem to make much sense.

Let's say that Alice thinks she a 10% chance of having COVID. Tests are perfectly accurate. Alice care about other people, so going to a party whilst infected is worth negative 50 utils. Going to a party is otherwise worth 10 utils.

Then expected utility if Alice takes the test is 0.9 * 10 + 0.1 * 0 = 9.

Expected utility if she doesn't take the test is 0.9 * 10 + 0.1 * -50 = 5.

So taking the test leaves her better off than not taking the test.

This is a special case of the general rule that knowing more information should never be a negative for a rational agent.

So what's going on here?

The answer is that Alice doesn't actually care about other people. Going to a party whilst infectious is worth just as many utils to her as going to a party whilst COVID free.

What Alice cares about is being a moral person. And moral people don't go to parties whilst knowing they're infectious. But moral people do go to parties whilst they might have an infection. So if she avoids finding out if she infectious she gets a guaranteed 10 utils at 0 cost.

One way to model this is that a moral action is one that somebody who genuinely cares about other people will do. We don't genuinely care about other people, but we care about doing moral actions. So we make the minimal changes from pure moral action so that we can mostly take moral actions, whilst still mostly just doing whatever we want. By making the slightly immoral action of not doing a COVID test, we avoid having to make the very immoral action of going to a party whilst infected.

Note that I don't want to claim people don't care about other people at all. I'm reducing the motives in this particular case to a simplified human with only a single motivation, and exploring that particular facet of our motives, but as ever, people are complex and other scenarios can best be explained by assuming that people do genuinely care for others.
# Best LessWrong posts for understanding scientific studies.

For someone who is not totally quantitatively literate, or whose background is outside of STEM, what are the best resources for understanding scientific studies? I'm looking for books, articles, or posts that explain both the different parts of these studies and what is most relevant about them. What should I be paying attention to when reading a study? What are some red flags when looking at a study that would signal epistemic uncertainty?
# Treat Examples as World-Building

Tl;dr: Examples in an essay work like world-building in a fantasy novel: too little of them and the idea/story lacks substance, too many and it's weighted down.

[John](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/johnswentworth) keeps telling me to use more examples in my work and writing, and he's right: they enliven a post, give you a hook for free, and ensure that your idea is deep enough to appear at many different places. Going from "without example" to "with example" is always progress.

Yet I noticed myself overindulging in examples. When writing [my last post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X7N96LvWQfrS4tjFz/scientific-wrestling-beyond-passive-hypothesis-testing), I structured a whole draft by presenting one cool example after another, and noting the implications for my general idea. But the examples are not the message! What I wanted to convey was the thesis, the core idea of the post, with examples as illustration and anchors. Instead, I found myself showing off my extensive research one example at a time.

That's when it hit me: I was info-dumping.

The image that came to my mind was a fantasy author so in love with his world-building that he takes every opportunity (and some more) to serenade you about the minutely crafted economic system or the elaborated (and linguistically coherent!) invented language.

The more I think about it, the more I like this metaphor. If I keep it in mind, I expect that my misuse of examples will be obvious, just like I notice info-dumping easily.

Here's a couple of implications:

*   Don't have too many examples. Just like too much info-dumping distracts from the story.
    *   John told me once that three is a good number; I think that five is probably the maximum for a single post.
*   Always have examples. A story without a world rarely captures a reader's attention.
*   Only present the relevant examples or the relevant part of the examples, not all that you've studied. Info-dump isn't excused because you spent week building the world.
*   Don't go into too much detail when describing the examples. Descriptions forever will annoy the reader.
    *   As much detail as you need to get the point across, and nothing more. From time to time a bit of color or a really cool bit.
*   Research your examples as much as you need, but not much further. Don't go into the deep hole of world-building and lose months fine-tuning your invented banking system if you have a single scene at the bank.
    *   I think there are some examples that deserve a deep dive, but far fewer that you would expect.
*   Use examples to rekindle the reader curiosity. Show the glory of the world when the story slows down.
    *   Works well after (or before, depending on your style) an abstract point.
# I left Russia on March 8

I moved to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, a small country in Central Asia. I am travelling with family and a toddler. The town is lovely and has many nice cafes. 

International travel from Russia is still possible here, as many work migrants in Russia are from Kyrgyzstan. So planes are flying and money sending services seems to work. 

There was some kind of interview on the Russian side of the border: when you will return? why your vacation is so long? Some people said that their phones were checked and border guards read their message history. My message history was clean. 

Note that any non-official opinion about the current Russian operation could be punished by 15 years in jail according to the new law.  It is also illegal to call it "war". So far no one was jailed for 15 years, but some people were fired or arrested for a shorter time after protests.
# Ways to invest your wealth if you believe in a high-variance future?

I largely follow standard financial advice, for example I have a moderate fraction of my wealth in retirement accounts. But I also put substantial weight on the future being... extremely high variance, such that I think there's a pretty good chance that "putting money away" will end up having been useless or at least not very useful. Generally I think it would be a pretty bad idea to have a *specific* belief about how the future is going to be extremely different and therefore wildly go against currently accepted financial best practices. But it seems highly reasonable, if one believes in the [most important century hypothesis](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/), to somehow change your investment plans for that. Here are some relevant futures I can imagine;

*   A straight-up fast-take-off singularity.
*   There's a mini-armageddon that causes some societal infrastructure to collapse. Maybe banks fail and I lose that money, or maybe people stop using USD and start bartering with petroleum and gold.
*   Society moves toward post-scarcity in a way that makes money less useful.
*   The legislative landscape changes. Maybe congress appropriates retirement accounts for emergency use. Or maybe longevity tech is going really well, and people's lifespans are longer congress extends the age at which you can take the money out. Maybe they retroactively change capital gains such that investing money was useless.

One problem I'm having is that while it's easy to come up with ideas that are useful in some of these scenarios (e.g. build a nuclear bunker) they're totally wasted in the other scenarios. It feels like there should be *some* way to convert current money into a non-abstract asset that would be always useful, and also fungible in the future. Like can I... somehow buy and store a ton of joules? Or can I somehow... buy 10 years worth of non-perishable food, to make sure I don't starve? When I try to think through these, the logistics seem to be more costly than any expected benefit.

The category that feels most promising to me is something like, invest in making myself a person more able to handle those high-variance scenarios. Gain skills in operations, negotiation, maintain good health, etc. But like, "become a stronger person" is just the kind of thing I'm always trying to do anyway, and it mostly seems to require time and cognitive resources. The thing I'm trying to figure out is how to convert **money** into being a stronger person.
# Arguments are good for helping people reason about things

Yudkowsky recently posted a [Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1500863629490544645) about how ideal reasoners respond to arguments. My understanding of his reasoning is:

1.  The more smart/rational/whatever you are, the better you are at figuring out what is true
2.  Thus, whether you believe the conclusion of an argument should be based primarily on whether the conclusion is true, rather than on how effectively the argument was presented

This principle seems valid to me.

Valentine, in a [LessWrong comment thread,](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LbyxFk8JmPKPAQBvL/we-re-already-in-ai-takeoff?commentId=Jzw63cLPNfQrwjQMt) used Yudkowsky's thread to draw the conclusion that a healthy rationalist community should not make arguments. I think this is silly. We are not, unfortunately, logically omniscient; we cannot just look at data and draw all the correct conclusions from it. The purpose of an argument is to help people realize what conclusions they should draw from data without having to figure it all out on their own.
# Alex Tabarrok advocates for crowdfunding systems with *Refund Bonuses*. I think this might be a natural occurrence of a money pump against Causal Decision Theory pledgers

Essentially, his version of Kickstarter has Refund Bonuses. His rationale is that there's little benefit to investigate or promote a probably-failing crowdfunding project, because that costs you time, so that could put projects in a bad equilibrium where no one will strive to believe in them tomorrow because nobody believes in them today. So Refund Bonuses breaks the vicious cycle by compensating that time-cost, by giving out a bonus to anyone who pledged, if and only if the project fails to meet its funding threshold. A paraphrasing of it is: It sends a strong signal that the project is confident that it will succeed, so if you would have been doubtful, you shouldn't be now.  
And, for a worthy project, the refund bonus would rarely need to actually be paid, so it costs little to offer them.

Hearing about this, something occurred to me. I think this might be a natural dutch-book against (trap, for) CDT (Causal Decision Theory. Background: [https://arbital.com/p/logical_dt/](https://arbital.com/p/logical_dt/) ).

The vice of a CDT agent is that it sometimes cannot anticipate that the decisions of other CDT agents will be entangled with its own decisions.

It'll go like this: An opportunistic CDTer might decide to look for campaigns that will fail, so that they can extract refund rewards. They watch the market for a bit, develop a sense of the patterns of failure and convince themselves of a strategy.

A bunch of other CDTers do the same thing and develop mostly the same strategies.

This turns into a game of chicken.

But CDT consistently underestimates the correlation of its decisions with those of other CDT agents, because it cannot use its own decision as evidence about others' decisions.

I'm not completely sure how much CDT underestimates by.

But if it's underestimating by a lot, many of its projected failing campaigns will be driven by cynical pledges unto success. This would run against my usual intuitions about CDT... Usually, it would underfund public goods, it appears to me that refund bonuses would lead it to overfund public goods. I guess the common factor is that in both cases it's failing a collective action problem.

Very few of the CDTers would end up making money by fishing for failure payouts. The [live players](https://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-versus-dead-players-2b24f6e9eae2) in this game admit that the CDT way of thinking has serious issues and they stop using it in this context (They might not know the LDT angle, so they'll just say things like "It's a fool's game. It's gambling." and at their best "This market is entirely anti-inductive."), but a dead player, who has no meta-rationality, may trudge on, always expecting to score, never seeing the invisible acausal logical threads connecting it to the mechanism of the trap.
# Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery

H/T [Aella](https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1503490760607469576).

A company that made machine learning software for drug discovery, on hearing about the security concerns for these sorts of models, asked: "huh, I wonder how effective it would be?" and within 6 hours discovered not only one of the most potent known chemical warfare agents, but also a large number of candidates that the model thought was more deadly.

This is basically a real-world example of the "it just works to flip the sign of the utility function and turn a 'friend' into an 'enemy'"; this was slightly more complicated as they had two targets that they jointly optimized for the drug discovery process (toxicity and bioactivity), and only the toxicity target is flipped. \[This makes sense--you'd want your chemical warfare agents to not be bioactive.\] It also required a little bit of domain knowledge--they had to specify which sort of bioactivity to look for, and picked one that would point towards this specific agent.
# Who is doing Cryonics-relevant research?

As part of my Biophysics Master, I am looking for a lab, to do a 3 months internship next winter.

I think one of the highest-impact applications of biophysics would be to research new&better methods for cryonic freezing, so I would love to get some insight into that field.

Do you, dear LW collective, have any groups you recommend doing exciting research in that area?

Due to the "pseudo-scientific" connotations of that whole topic, I do not feel entirely comfortable talking the whole thing over with my profs.
# AI researchers from Russia looking for a new home

Hello;  
Throwaway account for obvious reasons.  
A lot of AI researchers from Russia are looking for a new home. NLP, CV, etc.  
If you can help in any way or know anyone who can help please DM me.  
P.S. I think it would be a net positive for AI Safety to relocate as many people as possible.
# War Mode vs. Peace Mode


I first got this dichotomy by reading someone's comment on how Mao was a wartime general but not a peacetime general. Of course, it's possible that a more accurate model is not binary but a spectrum, or maybe it has more dimensions. Nonetheless, over time, I've found this heuristic useful. 

In war mode, the objective is survival. There's little room for ambiguity because one's utmost goal is not to get killed, which means anything new that pops up is treated as a potential threat until proven otherwise. It's prudent to assume the worst intentions from other people. Survival pressure is high; goodwill is low. Scarcity mindset and zero-sum games are common. Pragmatism is usually more useful than romanticism.

In peace mode, the objective is flourishing. There's lots of room for ambiguity because safety and stability are given. Anything new that pops up can be treated with curiosity. It's wise to assume the best intentions from other people, for it opens up possibilities. Survival pressure is low, though there might be pressure in status competitions. Abundance mindset and positive-sum games are common. Pragmatism might be seen as "uncool" compared to romanticism.

These two modes require distinct sets of skills, thus it's crucial to have an accurate model of which mode one is operating. For example, A negotiation is inherently war mode with some room for positive-sum games; open-source software is a product of peace mode; psychological trauma is living chronically in a war mode mindset, unable to adjust to peace mode.
# What do paradigm shifts look like?

One major question that heavily influences the choice of alignment research directions is the degree to which incremental improvements are necessary for major paradigm shifts. Because alignment is largely preparadigmatic, we may require a paradigm shift before we can make substantial progress towards aligning superhuman AI systems, rather than merely incremental improvements. The answer to this question determines whether the best approach to alignment is to choose metrics and try to make incremental progress on alignment research questions, or to mostly fund things that are long shots, or something else entirely. It also informs what policy we should take with respect to capabilities acceleration as an externality to alignment work: the degree to which incremental improvements in capabilities lead to paradigm shifts in capabilities informs how much we should worry about incremental capabilities improvements as a byproduct.   

Some possible ways-the-world-could-be include:

*   Incremental improvements have negligible impact on when paradigm shifts happen and could be eliminated entirely without any negative impact on when paradigm shifts occur. All or the vast majority of incremental work is visible from the start as low risk low reward, and potentially paradigm shift causing work is visible from the start as high risk high reward.
*   Incremental improvements serve to increase attention in the field and thus increase the amount of funding for the field as a whole, thereby proportionally increasing the absolute number of people working on paradigmatic directions, but funding those working on potential paradigm shifts directly would yield the same paradigm shifts at the same time
*   Incremental improvements are necessary to convince risk averse funding sources to continue funding something, since putting money into something for years with no visible output is not popular with many funders, and thus forces researchers to divert a certain % of their time to working on funder-legible incremental improvements.
*   Most paradigm shifts arise from attempts to make incremental improvements that accidentally uncover something deeper in the process. It is difficult to tell before embarking on a project whether it will only yield an incremental improvement, no improvement at all, or a paradigm shift.
*   Most paradigm shifts cannot occur until incremental improvements lay the foundation for the paradigm shift to happen, no matter how much effort is put into trying to recognize paradigm shifts.
*   Something else?

I think figuring out which of these universes we're in would be enormously valuable and seems especially high leverage. I think in particular there are likely to be many different perspectives on this and a lot of productive disagreement between those perspectives, so I don't think multiple people working on this has a stepping-on-toes effect.
# Formal epistemiology for extracting truth from news sources

Disclaimer: I'm a long-time HPMoR/Sequences fan and ocassional lurker here at LessWrong. This is my very first post. English is not my first language.  
  
I'm also Russian, and as you probably know Russia is in a bit difficult geopolitical situation right now. I'm againt war, I think that this is both immoral and strategic blunder by our government. But some of my friends and family members disagree with some/all of those, for various reasons. Also, sometimes we can't even agree about basic facts - for example, my brother recently told me that Zelensky left Kyiv quite some time ago, all the while European delegation was coming TO Kyiv to meet him. All the while they are mostly smart people (knowledge jobs, high IQ).  
  
I tend to trust reputable Western sources (Guardian, BBC, Reuters), especially if they agree with each other. I also mostly trust Wikipedia (I check sources when questioned). They think those are Western propaganda. They don't really watch our television, instead getting info from Telegram channels and image boards (as far as I can tell). I think their sources are terrible, but it's somewhat hard to argue.  
  
I'm interested if there were any attempts at formal rules of transforming media feed into world model. Preferably with Bayesian interference and cool math. So I can try to discuss these with my friends and maybe even update my own model.
# Is Grabby Aliens built on good anthropic reasoning?

An underlying assumption of the [Grabby Aliens paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.01522) by Robin Hanson *et al.*, if I understand it, is the following:

*We should expect to find ourselves as a member of a uniformly-randomly-selected civilization out of all civilizations in the history of the universe*.

In other words, if there’s a master list of every civilization in the universe’s past, present, and future, our prior should be that our human civilization should be uniformly-randomly selected from that list. If you accept that assumption, then you’re obligated to perform a Bayesian update towards hypotheses-about-the-universe that predict a master-list-of-all-civilizations with the property that human civilization looks like a “typical” civilization on the list. My impression is that this assumption (and corresponding Bayesian update) is the foundation upon which the whole Grabby Aliens paper is built. (Well, that plus the assumption that there are no *other* Bayesian updates that need to be taken into account, which I think is [dubious](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JD7fwtRQ27yc8NoqS/strong-evidence-is-common), but let’s leave that aside.)

If that’s right, I’m confused where this assumption comes from. When I skim discussions of anthropic reasoning (e.g. in [Nick Bostrom's book](https://www.anthropic-principle.com/), and on [lesswrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/anthropics), and on [Joe Carlsmith's blog](https://handsandcities.com/), etc.), I see lots of discussion about “SIA” and “SSA” and “UDASSA” and so on. But the Grabby Aliens assumption above seems to be *none* of those things—in fact, it seems to require strongly rejecting *all* of them! (E.g., note how the Grabby Aliens assumption does *not* weight civilizations by their population.)

I feel like I’m missing something. I feel like there are a bunch of people who have spent a bunch of time thinking about anthropics (I’m not one of them), and who *endorse* some “standard” anthropic reasoning framework like SIA or SSA or UDASSA or whatever. Do all those people think that the Grabby Aliens paper is a bunch of baloney? If so, have they written about that anywhere? Or am I wrong that they’re contradictory? (Or conversely, has anyone tried to spell out in detail why the Grabby Aliens anthropic assumption above is a good assumption?)
# Only needs a flying saucer

This is a personal entry. I do not write it to convey much information, it's more of a point of view thing. I was asked for an inside view, but I guess that's not exactly it.

My mother, my son and I are now in the Czech Republic. This we owe to the goodwill and kindness of very many people, starting with a random guy on the way to the train station in Kyiv. To really describe it, I would need to put "incredible" before every second word, so, like. Let it just be "incredible people".

And now I am in a position to extend the invitation to another friend or family member. I have to choose between N., a mother with her two children and another N., also a mother with two children. Or between one of the mothers-and-kids sets and O., my pregnant sister. Or between O. and the bedridden son of A., the man to whom I owe not jumping out the window. (Not literally. Maybe even not nearly this. Don't know for sure. Only know for sure that A. is not going to leave Kyiv if his son is there. And there is this interesting detail that I am not in direct contact with his son's caretaker. So if anything happens to the man who talked me out of doing stupid things with my life, I will have no way of knowing if anything happens to his son. And I know that, and A. knows that. And A. asks for nothing. Well, he has asked if I have a flying saucer. I don't.) 

And if anyone of them manages to come to Czech - it might take a week or more just to come here to Czech - my debt to the master of the house where we are staying grows, well, incredibly much more... My debt to the master of the house who wants himself a Ukrainian wife who knows how to cook and manage the household...

I will have to somehow find a job to help the household because the subsidy for hosting Ukrainians is capped at three Ukrainians. I don't know how I will do it. There is enough work about the house that some nights I don't read any news after dinner; I go to sleep. 

My mother is unwell. She doesn't speak Czech. My ten-year-old son is going to start school here. He doesn't speak Czech. I don't speak Czech, and most people I have met here do not speak English, German, Ukrainian or Russian. Frankly, I have my hands full without a job.

And the people back home are hiding in their cellars from bombs falling overhead and hoping, 
hoping, 
hoping
 somebody would tell them they can come and not be alone.
# Cold Takes reader survey - let me know what you want more and less of!

I'm interested in readers' takes on what I should be doing more and less of on this blog. I will generally write what I feel like writing, even if my audience has asked for less of it, but knowing what my audience wants will have some effect on what I feel like writing.

If you're up for weighing in on this, I appreciate it! Please use [this Google form](https://forms.gle/swTzVDZRQvokgyKy9). It also has some basic questions about my readers that I'm interested in the answers to (all questions are optional).

Estimated time: 10 minutes.

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# Retrospective: Context and Communication

Context and Communication was the third Guild of the Rose course. The course served as an introduction to communication and spanned the four weeks from 12/01/2021 to 01/01/2022. It followed our established flipped-classroom model and was taught by Olivia, one of our Guild members.

For more information, see the linked article.
# When will kids stop wearing masks at school?

I'm visiting Berkeley now and I walk past the local elementary school and I see all these kids running laps around the basketball court. Wearing masks. Gosh, PE class was bad enough back in my day... I talked to a high schooler walking by and they said that (in their school at least) they aren't officially required to wear masks but they all do it anyway. Even outdoors.

How long will this go on? I'm interested because if the answer is "years" this influences my choice of where to send my daughter to school. Presumably not every school district is like this.

I created a prediction market for (a variant of) this question: [https://manifold.markets/DanielKokotajlo/will-most-boston-public-school-kids](https://manifold.markets/DanielKokotajlo/will-most-boston-public-school-kids)

(For context: I am pretty against kids wearing masks these days, especially outdoors. Because I think the amount of micromorts thereby prevented is really, really, ridiculously small, too small to justify the inconvenience. I'd be interested to see if anyone has crunched the numbers and come to a different conclusion. I haven't crunched the numbers myself recently.)
# How to prevent authoritarian revolts?

I was browsing reddit mindlessly when I saw this maybe ~10 posts down from the top of r/all, and I kind of snapped:

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/39ec801578f607cbbabf4c014430a6ef850973013e535529.png)

I am not a communist. I think violent communist revolt would result in, at the very least, a period of significant loss of life and economic destruction. Successful communist revolts usually (but not always) produce brutal, authoritarian police states.

Yet it it seems to me like violent communist uprisings are fairly overtly supported by a sizable fraction of the American populace, perhaps 1-5%. When I talk to the larger fraction of the American populace that does not actively sympathize, they appear to be much, much more comfortable with this than I am. They speak as if the FBI was somehow omnipotent, or as if the internet has removed the possibility for popular revolt inside countries with strong civil liberties.

This optimism is *insane*. Authoritarian factions are *adversaries*. They are run by real people with real political ambitions who attempt to move around what you think are the tripwires. They will mask themselves even to internal supporters as "social democracy" or "alternative right" or what-ever, and take off the mask right as they are lining you up against a wall. When they do, our turtle-paced glorified three-letter bureaucracies stand a real and substantial chance of being too slow to react.  

A large part of this procedure is the revolutionary alerting everyone of their pending revolution before anything actually illegal happens. Statements like the above accomplish a task in this vein: demonstrate widespread sympathy and tolerance for murder. They serve as an important coordination mechanism, and that is the job they are performing in the above post.

In the general case I think most people intuitively understand why this should make everyone nervous. If 1-5% of the United States were upvoting posts on Reddit explaining how they "unironically" support a fascist uprising and gassing all Jewish Foreign Agents, well... finish the sentence. I would at least not have to explain why this political propagandist threatening to kill a large number of people is a bad omen and why it's a cause for concern.

So I'm asking: what can I do now to help prevent this from happening? I don't want to wait ten years so the problem can get 10-![\infty ](https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/c26c105004f30c27aa7c2a9c601550a4183b1f21)% worse. I don't want to deflect by saying that the meteor has got at least 30 more years on its flight path before it kills 25% of the people in my hometown. I want to act now.
# What are the best elementary math problems you know?

I'm looking for math problems of a specific kind. Here are the conditions I hope the problems satisfy:

- A good mathematician who hasn't seen the problem before should take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours to solve it.
- The solution should only involve undergraduate level maths. Difficult Putnam problems are a good benchmark for what kind of maths background should be required to solve the problems. The background required can be much less than this, but it shouldn't be more.
- For whatever reason you think the problem should be more widely known. The reason is completely up to you: the solution might include some insight which you find useful, it might be particularly elegant, it might involve some surprising elements that you wouldn't expect to appear in the context of the problem, *et cetera*.
- It's fine if the problem is well known, your examples don't have to be original or obscure.

Here are some examples:

- If a polynomial with rational coefficients defines an injective map \\( \mathbb Q \to \mathbb Q \\), must it also define an injective map \\( \mathbb R \to \mathbb R \\)? If yes then prove this is true, if no then find an explicit counterexample.

- Prove that \\( \operatorname{Hom}(\prod_{k \in \mathbb N} \mathbb Z, \mathbb Z) \cong \bigoplus_{k \in \mathbb N} \mathbb Z \\). In words, prove that homomorphisms of abelian groups from the direct product of countably many copies of \\( \mathbb Z \\) to \\( \mathbb Z \\) themselves form a group that's isomorphic to the direct sum of countably many copies of \\( \mathbb Z \\).

- If \\( f : \mathbb R \to \mathbb R \\) is a continuous function such that the sequence \\( f(\alpha), f(2 \alpha), f(3 \alpha), \ldots \\) converges to \\( 0 \\) for every \\( \alpha > 0 \\), must it be the case that \\( \lim_{x \to \infty} f(x) = 0 \\)? If yes then prove this is true, if no then find an explicit counterexample.

They are all relatively famous but they should give a sense of the flavor of what I'm looking for.
# Cyberwar escalation

From arstechnica article [Sabotage: Code added to popular NPM package wiped files in Russia and Belarus](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/03/sabotage-code-added-to-popular-npm-package-wiped-files-in-russia-and-belarus/):

> Two weeks ago, the node-ipc author pushed a new version of the library that sabotaged computers in Russia and Belarus, the countries invading Ukraine and providing support for the invasion, respectively. The new release added a function that checked the IP address of developers who used the node-ipc in their own projects. When an IP address geolocated to either Russia or Belarus, the new version wiped files from the machine and replaced them with a heart emoji.

I would expect that there are currently officers at the FSB and also non-government actors in Russia who are thinking about how to retaliate against this attack. 

If you don't have a setup for data backup and would lose important data if someone wiped your hard drive, now is the time to fix it. 

If you have the keys for any package on which others depend it also makes sense to make sure that you aren't an easy target for the FSB and other Russian hackers who want to retaliate in kind. 

Packaging your cyberweapon in a peace-not-war module is like it's 1984. It would be good if the FBI reacts fast and charges RIAEvangelist for hacking to prevent escalation of the conflict.

The [Biden administration](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/03/21/statement-by-president-biden-on-our-nations-cybersecurity/) also warns for increased cyber attacks:

> This is a critical moment to accelerate our work to improve domestic cybersecurity and bolster our national resilience.  I have previously warned about the potential that Russia could conduct malicious cyber activity against the United States, including as a response to the unprecedented economic costs we’ve imposed on Russia alongside our allies and partners. It’s part of Russia’s playbook. Today, my Administration is reiterating those warnings based on evolving intelligence that the Russian Government is exploring options for potential cyberattacks.
# [Closed] Job Offering: Help Communicate Infrabayesianism

Infrabayesianism seems to me (Abram) like a very promising framework for addressing at least some of the problems of AI alignment.

*   Like logical induction, it solves the realizability problem, creating an epistemic theory suitable for embedded agents.
*   Unlike logical induction, and unlike standard Bayesian decision theory, it presents a theory of epistemics ***directly relevant to proving decision-theoretic results*** (in particular, useful learning-theoretic guarantees). Logical induction and standard Bayesian decision theories both can produce meaningful loss-bounding guarantees *with respect to predictive error*, but bounding *decision* error appears challenging for these approaches. Infrabayes provides a systematic way to get around this problem. Since decision error is much more meaningful for bounding risk, this seems highly relevant to AI safety. 
*   Being a new perspective on very basic issues, Infrabayesianism (or perhaps successors to the theory) may turn out to shed light on a number of other important questions.

(For more information on InfraBayes, see [the infrabayesianism sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/CmrW8fCmSLK7E25sa).)

However, I believe *infrabayesianism appears to have a communication problem*. I've chatted with several people who have strongly "bounced off" the existing write-ups. (I'm tempted to conclude this is a near-universal experience.)

There was even a [post](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WerwgmeYZYGC2hKXN/promising-posts-on-af-that-have-fallen-through-the-cracks) asking whether a big progress write-up -- [applying InfraBayes to naturalized induction](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gHgs2e2J5azvGFatb/infra-bayesian-physicalism-a-formal-theory-of-naturalized) \-\- had simply fallen through the cracks. 

Personally, *even though I've carefully worked through the first three posts* and re-visited my notes to study them more than once, I *still* am not fluent enough to confidently apply the concepts in my own work when they seem relevant. 

I would like to change this situation if possible. It's not obvious to me what the best solution is, but it seems to me like it could be possible to find someone who can help.

Properties which would make an applicant interesting:

*   Must be capable of fully understanding the mathematics. 
    *   See [the sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/CmrW8fCmSLK7E25sa) to get an idea of what kind of mathematics is involved; mainly topology, functional analysis, measure theory and convex analysis. Background in reinforcement learning theory is a bonus.
*   Must have good judgement when it comes to math exposition.
*   Must be a good editor.

Details of the job description are to be worked out, but probable activities include producing independent write-ups re-explaining InfraBayes from the ground up, in a more accessible way, assisting with the creation of a textbook and exercise sheet, and editing/writeups of additional posts.

(Even if not applying, discussion in the comments about possible ways to approach this bottleneck may be fruitful!)

[Apply here](https://forms.gle/Z8mmdjpqZxvxUXta6).
# In the very near future the internet will answer all of our questions and that makes me sad

Today if I type into Google’s search bar “how to move a couch into a moving plane using only a pair of avocados” the first result is not particularly on-point:

> ### [14 Tips for Moving Furniture | The Family Handyman](https://www.familyhandyman.com/list/10-tips-for-moving-furniture/)
> 
> [https://www.familyhandyman.com › list › 10-tips-for-m...](https://www.familyhandyman.com/list/10-tips-for-moving-furniture/)
> 
> Mar 8, 2022 — Tip the item backward *at* an angle and have one person carry the top while the other carries the bottom. This centers the weight and keeps the ...
> 
> Missing: ~~plane~~ ‎~~pair~~ ‎~~avocados~~

In some not very distant future, I expect the top result will be something like this:

> ### **How a pair of avocados was all I needed to move my couch into a moving plane**
> 
> [https://householdhints.gpteeble.com/](https://householdhints.gpteeble.com/) \> helpful advice > how-tos
> 
> Mar 23, 202x — I was surprised at *how* easy it ended up being to *move* my *couch* *into* a *moving plane* by using nothing but a *pair of avocados* and some common ...

Today’s result for “what was that scientific paper about how you could cure pancreatic cancer by eating your own toenails?”

> ### [Starving Pancreatic Cancer of Cysteine May Kill Tumor Cells](https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/starving-pancreatic-cancer-cysteine-may-kill-tumor-cells)
> 
> [https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu › news › starving-pan...](https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/starving-pancreatic-cancer-cysteine-may-kill-tumor-cells)
> 
> Apr 2, 2020 — *The* compound starves tumors *of* an amino acid, cysteine, which was found *to* be critical *to the* survival *of pancreatic cancer* cells.
> 
> Missing: ~~own~~ ‎~~toenails?~~

The not very distant future’s version:

> ### **Role of Unguiphagy in Remission of Pancreatic Cancer**
> 
> [https://oncologytoday.gpteeble.com/](https://oncologytoday.gpteeble.com/) \> Journal of Oncological Unguiphagy > latest
> 
> Mar 23, 202x — The median life span of patients following diagnosis of advanced Carcinoma of *pancreas* is usually not more than 3-6 months. However in patients who *eat* their *own toenails*, survival rates several times longer ...

Today, the internet can give okay answers to many of our questions. In the near future it will give astonishingly plausible answers to all of our questions. I am concerned.