trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
[Letter] Advice for High School #1
by lsusr — 2021-04-20T04:09:16.606Z

Hello! I'm a big fan of your work. Your perspectives on issues, while I may not always agree with them, are always insightful; thank you for helping make the world a more interesting place. I'm interested in learning Lisp and Vim, as it's been recommended many times by writers I find interesting. While I won't be able to dedicate my full time towards it now (due to good old high school+an intensive summer program), at some point in the future I am interested in putting work into learning these. Any courses or books you'd recommend? How did you learn? Also, any advice for getting started blogging? I think it'd be a productive use of my time and help improve my writing skills, but haven't been able to give myself the initial push. Finally, if there's any advice that you would have given to your high school self that may prove relevant to me, please pass it on; if I know I'm going to learn something in the future from future mistakes, I may as well try to learn the lesson now. Hope you're doing well.

Yours,

[redacted]

Dear [redacted],

I am happy to hear you do not always agree with me. Sometimes I am wrong. You should not agree with people when they are wrong.

Vim

My favorite book on Vim is Practical Vim by Drew Neil but the free books here are probably fine. My post on Vim is enough to get you started. The most important thing is that you write everything in Vim. I wrote this blog post in Spacemacs with Vim keybindings before cut & pasting it into the Less Wrong Markdown editor.

Lisp

The utility of a programming language comes from its syntax and its libraries. Lisp has the best syntax. Good libraries come from popularity. Lisp has never been popular. The best Lisp dialects appropriate libraries from other languages. Hy (which integrates with Python libraries) is the one I use but I have heard good things about the others.

There are no good books on Lisp. The Lisp books I know of all use obsolete dialects. I learned by reading a few chapters of Practical Common Lisp and On Lisp and then working out the rest on my own. There is no well-trodden path.

I recommend you just use Hy in place of Python and then try to write short code. The rest may take care of itself.

Blogging

My favorite book on creative pursuits is Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. Like Vim, the important thing about blogging is that you just get started. Create a free Wordpress, GitLab or Les...
Iterated Trust Kickstarters
by Raemon — 2021-04-20T03:18:01.849Z

Epistemic Status: I haven't actually used this through to completion with anyone. But, it seems like a tool that I expect to be useful, and it only really works if multiple people know about it.

In this post, I want to make you aware of a few things:

Iterated kickstarters: Kickstarters where all the payment doesn't go in instantly – instead people pay in incrementally, after seeing partial progress on the goal. (Or, if you don't actually have a government-backed-assurance-contract, people pay in incrementally as you see other people pay in incrementally, so the system doesn't require as much trust to bootstrap)

Trust kickstarters: Kickstarters that are not about money, and are instead about "do we have the mutual trust, goodwill and respect necessary to pull a project or relationship off?" I might be wary of investing into my relationship with you, if I don't think you're going to invest in me.

Iterated trust kickstarters: Combining those two concepts – incrementally ratcheting up trust over time. I think this something people intuitively do sometimes, but it's nice to be able to do it intentionally, and communicate crisply about it.

...

Alternate phrasing of a key insight: one solution to a prisoner's dilemma is to break it into multiple stages, so you have an iterated prisoner's dilemma, which has a different incentive structure.

Iterated Kickstarters

In The Strategy of Conflict, Thomas Schelling (of Schelling Point fame), poses a problem: Say you have a one-shot coordination game. If Alice put in a million dollars, and her business partner Bob puts in a million dollars, they both get their money back, plus $500,000 extra. But if only one of you puts in a million, the other can abscond with it.

A million dollars is a lot of money for most people. Jeez.

What to do?

Well, hopefully you live in a society that has built well-enforced laws around assurance contracts (aka "kickstarters"). You put in a million. If your partner backs out, the government punishes them, and/or forces them to return the money.

But what if there isn't a government? What if we live in the Before Times, and we're two rival clans who for some reason have a temporary incentive to work together (but still incentive to defect)? What if we live in present day, but Alice and Bob are two entirely different countries with no shared tradition of cooperation?

There are a few ways to solve this. But one ...
Quick examination of miles per micromort for US drivers, with adjustments for safety-increasing behavior
by Josh Jacobson — 2021-04-19T23:19:36.163Z
Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1F0CmumTbASFwki665tuN5YFriXeqi23WjY5RqjYbczA/edit?usp=sharing

This post links to a Google Sheet containing a quick investigation into the accuracy of Wikipedia's figure for miles per micromort (230) for US drivers, when accounting for preventative behaviors.

The following are the main outcome estimates:

Miles per micromort, no adjustments, in US (2019)	91
-- If excluding motorcycles	105
-- If excluding motorcycles and pedestrians, pedalcyclists, and other nonoccupants	137
-- Amongst passenger vehicle occupants only	132
-- Amongst passenger vehicle occupants only, if setting single-car crashes to 0	235
-- Amongst passenger vehicle occupants only, if approximating the seatbelt-wearing only rate	245
-- Amongst passenger vehicle occupants only, if setting single-car crashes to 0 and approximating the seatbelt-wearing only rate	442
-- Amongst passenger vehicle occupants only, if setting single-car crashes to 0 and approximating the seatbelt-wearing only rate and if setting alcohol-impaired, drowsiness-associated, and distraction-associated deaths to 50% of current level (as an approximation of controlling one driver's behavior in two driver crashes)	548

This rapid (~1.5 hrs including documentation) investigation was funded by Ruby Bloom via the Bountied Rationality FB group.
How can we increase the frequency of rare insights?
by MichaelDickens — 2021-04-19T22:54:03.154Z

In many contexts, progress largely comes not from incremental progress, but from sudden and unpredictable insights. This is true at many different levels of scope—from one person's current project, to one person's life's work, to the aggregate output of an entire field. But we know almost nothing about what causes these insights or how to increase their frequency.

Incremental progress vs. sudden insights

To simplify, progress can come in one of two ways:

Incremental improvements through spending a long time doing hard work.

Long periods of no progress, interspersed with sudden flashes of insight.

Realistically, the truth falls somewhere between these two extremes. Some activities, like theorem-proving, look more like the second case; other activities, like transcribing paper records onto a computer, look more like the first. When Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, he had to go through the grind of writing a 200-page proof, but he also had to have sparks of insight to figure out how to bridge the missing gaps in the proof.

The axis of incremental improvements vs. rare insights is mostly independent of the axis of easy vs. hard. A task can be sudden and easy, or incremental and hard. For example:[1]

incremental work
sudden insights

easy
algebra homework
geometry homework

hard
building machine learning models
proving novel theorems

Insofar as progress comes from "doing the work", we know how to make progress. But insofar as it comes from rare insights, we don't know.

Some meditations on the nature of insights

Why did it take so long to invent X?

Feynman on finding the right psychological conditions

Physicist Richard Feynman talks about this in Take the World from Another Point of View:

I worked out the theory of helium, once, and suddenly saw everything. I'd been struggling, struggling for two years, and suddenly saw everything at one time. [...] And then you wonder, what's the psychological condition? Well I know at that particular time, I simply looked up and I said wait a minute, it can't be quite that difficult. It must be very easy. I'll stand back, I'll treat it very lightly, I'll just tap it, and there it was! So how many times since then, I'm walking on the beach and I say, now look, it can't be that complicated. And I'll tap it, tap it, nothing happens.

Feynman tried to figure out what conditions lead to insights, but he "never ...
Wanted: Research Assistant for The Roots of Progress
by jasoncrawford — 2021-04-19T19:03:14.432Z
Link: https://rootsofprogress.org/wanted-research-assistant

UPDATE: I’ve filled this role. Thanks to all who applied!

I’m hiring a part-time research assistant to support work on my

essays

,

talks

, and the

book I’m writing

on the history of industrial civilization.

You must have the ability to orient yourself in unfamiliar mental territory; to penetrate the fog of confusing, incomplete, and contradictory information; to sniff out reliable sources of key facts and to corroborate them; and to quickly sketch out a new intellectual landscape.

You will handle queries such as:

What happened to the price of cotton and the wages of textile laborers before, during, and after textile mechanization in the 18th/19th centuries? Find data and analysis on this, including relevant statistics on labor productivity, and produce a list of sources.
What startups or other commercial projects are pursuing advanced nuclear reactor designs? Make a list, and fill out details of each in a spreadsheet, such as type of reactor, amount and sources of funding, etc.
Find first-person accounts of agricultural life and work before the 19th century, including descriptions of regular planting and harvesting seasons, and also times of crop failure or even famine.
What is the difference between a bloomery, a blast furnace, and a Catalan forge? Make a list of sources that address this question.

The deliverable will typically be a list of sources, with brief notes on what each one contains, ranked roughly in order of relevance to the original query. You don’t have to answer the questions I pose, but you need to find sources that help me answer them.

The only real requirements are writing skills and attention to detail. However, the ideal candidate would be:

A graduate student in history, economics, or a related field (ideally with access to scholarly sources)
Familiar with and interested the progress community in general, and my work in particular
Able to put in part-time work with fairly quick turnaround (24 hours for small queries would be excellent)

If you lack experience and credentials, apply anyway: you can make up for it by being dedicated, diligent, and willing/able to be trained.

The work will be variable, up to roughly 10–15 hours/week. We’ll mostly communicate by email/messaging, so you can be in any time zone. Pay: $25–30/hour, depending on qualifications.

To apply, send a CV/resume and writing sample to me at

jason@rootsofprogress.org

.
You Can Now Embed Flashcard Quizzes in Your LessWrong posts!
by spencerg — 2021-04-19T13:44:41.014Z

With the help of the LessWrong.com team, we've set up a way for you to embed flashcard quizzes directly in your LessWrong posts! This means that you can write flashcards for any of your LessWrong posts and either:

(a) quiz people as they read your article to help them retain your content, or

(b) provide an easy way for them to continue to be quizzed after they are done reading so that they can indefinitely remember the most important things they learned in your article!

Note that while many people think of flashcards as being just for facts and definitions, this is far from the truth! I personally use flashcards/spaced repetition daily for complex concepts, connections between ideas, ways of thinking about a problem, patterns, takeaways, strategies, arguments, triggers I want to associate with specific behavior, and so on.

This post will explain how to add flashcards to your own posts in a step-by-step fashion.

If you want to see an example of a LessWrong post with flashcards, check out my LessWrong post on self-control, where we first experimented with this feature.

And before we get to the instructions, here's an example (from that same post) of what embedded flashcards look like when you put them right in your article:

Adding flashcards to your post is quite simple. Just follow these steps:

Step 1: Create your own deck of flashcards using Thought Saver

Create a Thought Saver account at

app.thoughtsaver.com

and use it to create some flashcards for your post. You'll need to put all the flashcards for your post into the same deck. Here’s how to do that:

(i) Click “New Card” in Thought Saver to start creating a new flashcard - but don’t save it just yet.

(ii) In the text input box with the label "Decks"...

Type the name of the new deck you'd like to create for your article.
Hit "Enter" ("Return") or click "Create new deck".
This card has now been added to that deck, and this deck will now be available so that you can add all the other flashcards (for your post) to it too!

Example:

Type "Book summary: The Very Hungry Caterpillar."
Click 'Create new deck: "Book summary: The Very Hungry Caterpillar."'
Repeat these steps until you’ve created all flashcards for your article and added them all to this same deck.

Step 2: Go to the Thought Saver page for your new deck

(You’re ready to take this step once you've created all ...
D&D.Sci April 2021 Evaluation and Ruleset
by abstractapplic — 2021-04-19T13:26:58.278Z

This is a followup to the D&D.Sci post I made last week; if you haven’t already read it, you should do so now before spoiling yourself.

Here is the web interactive I built to let you evaluate your solution; below is an explanation of the rules used to generate the dataset. You’ll probably want to test your answer before reading any further.

Ruleset

(Note: to make writing this easier, I’m using standard D&D dice notation, in which “3+4d8” means “roll four eight-sided dice, sum the results, then add three”.)

Enemies

Sharks

Sharks are 1/6 of encounters.

They attack in groups of 2+1d4, each of which does 1d10 points of damage.

Demon Whales

Demon Whales are 1/14 of encounters. (If that fraction seems high, you’re failing to account for all the sunk ships that couldn’t report encountering them.)

An attack from a Demon Whale does 17d12 points of damage.

A Demon Whale encounter has a ~78% fatality rate

Crabmonsters

Crabmonsters are 1/14 of encounters.

A Crabmonster repeatedly rolls 1d80 as it tears through the ship, adding a point of damage with each roll, until it rolls a 1 (that is, encounters someone or something that stops it).

~8% of Crabmonster encounters do >200% damage; a Crabmonster encounter has a ~28% fatality rate

Pirates

Though the Navy’s records don’t bother to distinguish, Pirates come in two categories: Brigands (local criminals who had the poor fortune to cross paths with Naval supply ships while flying the black flag, and/or to mistake them for civilian cargo ships) and Privateers (agents of an enemy government, harassing your Navy’s fleet using hit-and-run tactics). Brigands are 1/6 of random encounters during your voyages, Privateers 1/21.

A fight with Brigands does 4d8 points of damage; a fight with Privateers does 6d12.

Merpeople

Surface-dwellers are unaware of the intricacies of underwater society, and record both Atlantean Merfolk (1/14 of encounters) and Alexandrian Merfolk (2/21 of encounters) as “Merpeople”. Fortunately, the two city-states are close enough politically that befriending one will cause them both to allow you free passage.

Atlanteans do 20+3d20 damage; Alexandrians do 1d8*1d8*1d8+1d20 damage.

~14% of Alexandrian attacks do >200% damage; an Alexandrian attack has a ~37% fatality rate

Kraken

Kraken are 2/21 of encounters.

They do 12d8 points of damage.

Nessie

Nessie is 1/21 of encounters.

She does 40+10d8 points of damage.

An encounter with N

...
Parameter count of ML systems through time?
by Jsevillamol — 2021-04-19T12:54:26.504Z

Pablo Villalobos and I have been working to compile a rough dataset of parameter counts for some notable ML systems through history.

This is hardly the most important metric about the systems (other interesting metrics we would like to understand better are training and inference compute , and dataset size), but it is nonetheless an important one and particularly easy to estimate.

So far we have compiled what it is (to our knowledge) the biggest dataset so far of parameter counts, with over a 100 entries.

But we could use some help to advance the project:

Is there any previous relevant work? We are aware of the AI and compute post by OpenAI, and there are some papers with some small tables of parameter counts.
If you want to contribute with an entry, please do! The key information for an entry is a reference (citation and link), domain (language, vision, games, etc), main task the system was designed to solve, parameter count (explained with references so its easy to double check), and date of publication. The criteria for inclusion is not very well defined at this stage in the process; we have been focusing on notable papers (>1000 citations), significant SOTA improvements (>10% improvement on a metric over previous system) and historical relevance (subjective). We mostly have ML/DL/RL papers, and some statistical learning papers. To submit an entry either leave an answer here, send me a PM, email jaimesevillamolina at gmail dot com or leave a comment in the spreadsheet.
If you'd be interested in joining the project, shoot me an email. The main commitment is to spend 1h per week curating dataset entries. Our current goal is compiling parameter counts of one system per year between 2000 and 2020 and per main domain. If you can compute the number of parameters of a CNN from its architecture you are qualified. I expect participating will be most useful to people who would enjoy having an excuse to skim through old AI papers.

Thank you to Girish Sastry and Max Daniel for help and discussion so far!
Problems of evil
by Joe Carlsmith — 2021-04-19T08:06:42.895Z

(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)

I.

I wasn’t raised in a religious household, but I got interested in Buddhism at the end of high school, and in Christianity and a number of other traditions, early in college. Those were the days of the New Atheists, and of intricate wrangling over theistic apologetics. And I did some of that. I went, sometimes, to the atheist group, and to some Christian ones; I read books, and had long conversations; I watched lectures, and YouTube debates.

Much of the back-and-forth about theism that I engaged with at that point in my life, I don’t think about much, now. But I notice that one bit, at least, has stayed with me, and seemed relevant outside of theistic contexts as well: namely, the problem of evil.

As usually stated, the problem of evil is something like: if God is perfectly good, knowing, and powerful, why is there so much evil in the world? But I think this version is too specific, and epistemic. Unlike many other issues in theistic apologetics, I think the problem of evil — or something in the vicinity — cuts at something much broader than a “three O” (omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent) God. Indeed, I think it cuts past belief, to a certain affirming orientation towards, and commitment to, reality itself — an orientation I think many non-theists, especially of a “spiritual” bent (including a secularized/naturalistic one), aspire towards, too.

II.

My impression is that of the many objections to theism, the problem of evil has, amongst theists, a certain kind of unique status — centrally, in its recognized force, and but also, in the way this force can apply independent of doubt about God’s existence per se.

Here’s the (devoutly Christian) theologian David Bentley Hart:

“That’s the best argument of all. It’s not an argument regarding God’s existence or non-existence, because that’s a question, first you have to define what existence means, what God means. But it goes directly to the question of divine goodness and benevolence. It’s the weightiest and the most powerful and the one that, actually, is the argument that’s adduced most often by believers, famously Dostoyevsky… It’s the argument that holds the most water for me.”

Indeed, Hart calls various responses to the problem of evil “banal and sometimes quite repulsive”:

“…the Calvinist argument for divine sovereignty, does it really have to justify itself to you morally; o

...
the fat baker principle
by faint reminder — 2021-04-19T07:58:05.376Z

Culpability

"wait am I responsible for the pareto depth thing"
"Yes." t. Jollybard
essay theme: https://soundcloud.com/jollybard/gigantopithecus

The self is the landlord of the mind

Beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experience.
Everyone knows this by now, we've already turned out the pockets of the laziest and most impoverished ideas,
the freeloaders in this informational class struggle have been evicted long ago.
If we're the land barons of our own minds, why stop at just a little power?
Taking this idea further, preferences should pay rent just as much as beliefs.
But what can a preference 'pay'?

The Fat Baker Principle

There are different competing constructions for the 'fat baker'. Naturally, I prefer mine.
One could go:"Never trust a thin baker."
Another: "it's way easier to become good at something if you actually enjoy what you make"
"lmao"
"lole!"
Finally: "how can you say you even like bread if you can't make a decent loafa?"

To put it another way, preferences should pay rent in changed behavior.
If you really like manga, maybe you should have internalized a model that can split out good manga from bad.
If you really, really, really like manga, maybe you should have internalized a model that's most of the way to synthesizing new manga.

Conclusions

This is not only a virtue-deontology ethics
("you should make things yourself if you like them enough to fling critique")
but a rudimentary system of personality-level course correction against flights of fancy.

If you find yourself liking something, do you find yourself wanting to curate examples of work, find other creatives, sketch out the bones of your own work?
Do you find yourself "liking" parasocial relationships of engagement and consumption with content-creators, luminaries, or "communities" instead?
If you can only like your likes at arms length, mediated through others and not your own hands, you might not like them as much as you think you do.