trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Bellman's Curse on Advice
by nibnalin — 2021-04-19T02:30:34.588Z

This is a linkpost for https://nibnalin.me/dust-nib/bellmans-curse-of-dimensionality.html

In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the most fundamental challenge we face is just grokking the high dimensionality of a state space. Go is a "simple" game whose rules can be fully explained on a single sheet of paper, yet those rules yield more board configurations than the number of atoms in the universe (10174). Given the state space, how does any solver for this game even represent these configurations, let alone evaluate them? While games are helpful toys to start with, this phenomenon of “exponential explosion” in systems is extremely common in many real-world problems, where we’ve given it the stage name: Bellman’s Curse of Dimensionality.

While popular study of dimensionality is usually focused on tight, mathematical systems, I’ve found that thinking about dimensionality as a metaphor in other, less well-defined systems is a surprisingly helpful tool.

Advice, for instance, tends to fit such a model very naturally. You have an extremely large state space (life) where you only get one opportunity to traverse a path. To add to that, like the typical exponential problem, as dimensionality of life increases, the volume of the space of possibilities increases so fast that the available data on historical outcomes becomes quite sparse. How, then, can someone evaluate others’ advice, or look at someone else’s life to figure out what they should do with their own?

I don't claim to have a solution to this problem, but in my experience it's helpful to keep the dimensionality framework suggested by Bellman in the back of your mind as you navigate advice. For starters, thinking about the dimensions in this space independently is helpful to evaluate different states clearly:

Time: Your professor probably don’t have the best advice for you because their own experience about your situation was frozen in 1980s, and a lot about the world has changed since then.

Space: Advice about fundraising from a US entrepreneur is obviously not as relevant for someone raising in India or China.

Internal state: This is one of the harder categories to pin down. One way to think about these is as some function of an individual's personality and thought processes, but I think that only scratches the surface of what this broad category intends to cover. If someone attempts to use Steve

...
Are there good classes (or just articles) on blog writing?
by Brendan Long — 2021-04-19T01:10:21.368Z

I've been writing a blog for a long time, and I think the articles that actually get posted tend to be decent. Unfortunately, I have a lot of articles that never make it past the draft (or even outlining) stages. It seems like once I get past a certain level of complexity I just get lost. I have trouble deciding how to structure posts (or whether I should split them into a series), and I'm terrible at writing introductions and conclusions. I'm also not particularly good at headlines, although I consider this a less-important problem.

Are there good articles / books / classes on how to do this, ideally with well-chosen practice ("Outline articles on these topics", "Write an article on this topic", "Write an introduction for this post?", etc)? I would be willing to pay money for this if it's good enough, especially if I had access to someone who could review my work and give suggestions.

I assume one method of doing this is "practice until you get good at it". I've occasionally just forced myself to write something and then post it, but I almost always end up deleting these posts because they're not up to my standards, and I feel like they don't count as "deliberate practice" because I can tell that something is wrong with them but I don't have the experience to know what it is.

I've been looking through SkillShare and other things I've found via searches, but they also seem to skip over the "actually writing an article" step and focus on things I don't need help with, like:

I don't need to setup my blog (I already have one)

I don't need help with SEO

I don't care about monetization right now

I already have ideas for articles
Updating the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis
by johnswentworth — 2021-04-18T21:45:05.898Z

Epistemic status: not confident enough to bet against someone who’s likely to understand this stuff.

The lottery ticket hypothesis of neural network learning (as

aptly described

by Daniel Kokotajlo) roughly says:

When the network is randomly initialized, there is a sub-network that is already decent at the task. Then, when training happens, that sub-network is reinforced and all other sub-networks are dampened so as to not interfere.

This is a very simple, intuitive, and useful picture to have in mind, and the

original paper

presents interesting evidence for at least some form of the hypothesis. Unfortunately, the strongest forms of the hypothesis do not seem plausible - e.g. I doubt that today’s neural networks already contain dog-recognizing subcircuits at initialization. Modern neural networks are big, but not that big. (See this comment for some clarification of this claim.)

Meanwhile, a cluster of research has shown that large neural networks approximate certain Bayesian models, involving phrases like “neural tangent kernel (NTK)” or “Gaussian process (GP)”.

Mingard et al. show that

these models explain the large majority of the good performance we see from large neural networks in practice. This view also implies a version of the lottery ticket hypothesis, but it has different implications for what the “lottery tickets” are. They’re not subcircuits of the initial net, but rather subcircuits of the parameter tangent space of the initial net.

This post will sketch out what that means.

Let’s start with the jargon: what’s the “parameter tangent space” of a neural net? Think of the network as a function f with two kinds of inputs: parameters θ, and data inputs x. During training, we try to adjust the parameters so that the function sends each data input x(n) to the corresponding data output y(n) - i.e. find θ for which y(n)=f(x(n),θ), for all n. Each data point gives an equation which θ must satisfy, in order for that data input to be exactly mapped to its target output. If our initial parameters θ0 happen to be close enough to a solution to those equations, then we can (approximately) solve this using a linear approximation: we look for Δθ such that

y(n)=f(x(n),θ0)+Δθ⋅dfdθ(x(n),θ0)

The right-hand-side of that equation is essentially the parameter tangent space. More pre...
Anger
by lsusr — 2021-04-18T16:14:08.309Z

I don't get angry. I haven't gotten angry in ten years. A Buddhist would say I have "pulled up anger by the roots".

Anger is predicated on the desire to hurt someone. The desire to hurt someone as a terminal value is pure evil.

I have been on the receiving end of a lot of anger. Ostensibly, it is because of things I did or I didn't do. None of that matters. How often a particular person gets angry at me has little to do with me and everything to do with that person.

Though I no longer get angry, I do feel stress. My baseline stress is a function of physical exercise, social interaction, food, meditation and art. But that's not goes through my head. When I feel stress, I go looking for something I'm doing wrong like an appointment I've forgotten about, a chore I've been putting off or some other personal inadequacy. I misattribute the stress to a confabulation and then go about solving the wrong problem.

I think angry people do the same thing. They feel anger before identifying a target. This would explain why observation that whether someone gets angry at me in a particular interaction correlates with how frequently that person has gotten angry at me in the past and cannot be predicted by my proximate influence.

With particularly angry people, I can predict when they will get angry before they do but I cannot predict what they will get angry at. Except that, if I am alone with the person, the target will eventually become me no matter what I do.

There are two red flags to avoid almost all dangerous people: 1. The perpetually aggrieved ; 2. The angry.

―100 Tips for a Better Life by Ideopunk

When I was a kid I had an adult berate me for not shoveling dirt into a hole and then, an hour later, berate me for shoveling dirt into the hole. Neither beratement had anything to do with the task. He just wanted to make me suffer. But he didn't understand his own motivation. He confabulated that I was a lazy kid who should have known better than than to do (or not do) whatever I was doing (or not doing).

The most undeserving victims of anger are the victims of genocides and such. But in my personal experience, the people for whom anger causes the most suffering are angry people themselves. Anger is incompatible with happiness. If you are frequently angry then you are frequently unhappy.

Pulling up anger by the roots makes you a gentler, happier person. The catch is that ang...
Rising rents and appropriate responses
by dominicq — 2021-04-18T14:05:35.485Z

I was recently involved in a discussion related to real estate and rising rents. A friend proposed this policy: "We should limit the extent to which the city can expand, and we should have rent caps so that the prices don't go up." I responded: "That means that purchase prices will go up dramatically, if the influx of new citizens doesn't stop." She said: "Yes, but that will be temporary - the prices will stabilize at some point, they cannot grow forever."

I agree that they cannot grow forever. The prices will stabilize, that much is certain, but they will stabilize at a very high point. I proposed that there are essentially two futures: you either have a San Francisco scenario, where new construction is very difficult, but since people still want to come and live there, the prices for renting and owning are incredibly high OR you have a Tokyo scenario, where you tear down old neighborhoods to make place for gigantic complexes which allow very dense living (and still have high prices because the demand still exceeds the supply).

What happens if you institute construction limits and rent control? Ownership prices go up, and rent goes up in the surrounding places. People want to go to hubs so much that they will forego the benefits of living in other areas. The opportunities in the city simply outweigh what they can get elsewhere.

Given a constant influx of new citizens to a hypothetical city:

If you institute construction limits: this hits the poor the most, because now everyone is competing for a very limited resource (available housing).

If you institute rent control: this helps the poor temporarily because the prices are more affordable, but since you now limit how much construction companies can earn, there will be less construction. How much less? Difficult to say.

If you institute both: prices of owning will rise, and mobility among those who rent will drop (every rental property charges the maximum possible rent and is already rented out - which means you cannot just move out of your apartment and easily find a new one). If the influx of citizens remains constant, with time, all housing will be bought up (by those who can afford it) and there will be very little for renting (again, hitting the poor the most because if you're poor, you have to rent).

If you do literally nothing at all: construction companies will build as much as they can, people will buy/rent...
The hour I first alieved
by matejsuchy — 2021-04-17T17:02:01.733Z
Link: https://matejsuchy.substack.com/p/i-hour-i-first-alieved

0 Summary

Many believe that religious behavior is only justified if one has religious belief. I disagree, argue that religion should be managed according to its membership in what I call the category of “Adaptive Distorted States of Perception”, and attempt to make the rationalist case for moderate orthopraxis.

I Intro

One of my philosophy professors at university adopts a seemingly pathological behavior; he attends Church every Sunday, despite lacking belief in God. It may be worth mentioning that the university in question is not a Christian college, but rather your run-of-the-mill secularized Ivy. Of course, he is not alone in doing something like this. But, perhaps somewhat uniquely, he does so neither due to a failure to parse his beliefs nor because of inertia. Instead, he chose to adopt this practice as a result of first principles reasoning, reasoning which I ultimately do not find compelling, but which nonetheless centers a question which I believe allows for a productive reframing of the problem:

Do we make a category error when we speak of religious belief?

Here, I’ll seek to argue that we ask too much of religious experience when we seek to espouse global beliefs which accord with it. I will seek to instead identify a category of adaptive imperatives, place religious experience in this category, and suggest that we ought to evaluate its value and its place in life in the same way in which we evaluate that of its categorical peers, such as romance and appreciation of art.

II Alief and Possession

What do romance and appreciation of art have in common? They are rationalizable only if with alief; that is to say, by some perturbation to the rationally-assented-to world-map.

On some level, many people recognize that infatuated love presupposes strange beliefs — that the object of our love is particularly fascinating, good, or even divine among the alternatives. Jungian Psychology seems silly until one remembers the vivid imagery which the mind constellates around one’s lovers in the heat of youth. In the arms of a lover, we adopt a map of the world that is a radical distortion of the one we rationally ascribe to in our more clear-headed moments. Even if in the back of our minds we recognize that this map is not correct (useful) in a global sense, we nonetheless feel its weight. In a sense, we are blissfully unable to reject the peculiar ontology of love.

The st...
Defining "optimizer"
by Chantiel — 2021-04-17T15:38:00.352Z

I've been thinking about how to define "optimizer".

My attempted definition of "optimizer" is, "something such that there is a method of describing a change to it to concretely describe a system that scores unusually highly on another function, for a wide range of functions, in a way that's significantly shorter description length than specifying a system that achieves unusually highly on that function from scratch."

The basic justification for my definition is that if something is an optimizer, then if you were to write a program that emulates the system, then the program would be an implementation of some optimization algorithm. And you could describe something that optimizes for something else by changing the parts of the code responsible for what is in effect the systems' objective function.

The justification can be extended to logical descriptions of systems that aren't necessarily describable as programs. I said in the definition that the new system need to be concretely described. This is so you can't call a rock or other random thing an optimizer because you could describe a new system as something like "This rock, except for being great at optimizing". The same goes for non-rocks.

The definition seems to work okay.

Humans and AIs would be considered optimizers. This is because a system that optimizing for x can be described by describing a change to the emotions or values of the human or AI in the right way.

And a toaster isn't an optimizer. Even though toasters are good at scoring highly on making well-toasted bread, the mechanisms for toasting aren't particularly useful for optimizing much else. So I don't think describing a change to a toaster to make it score well on a random other function would be easier than specifying the system from scratch.

And I don't think other various things in our environment, like tools and inanimate objects, would be classified as optimizers. This is because, like toasters, tools and miscellaneous objects don't do anything much that could generalize to a wide range of other functions, so I don't think describing an optimizer would be made much easier or less complicated than specifying one from scratch.

Thoughts?
Book review and policy discussion: diversity and complexity
by victorsintnicolaas — 2021-04-17T11:36:38.789Z

This is a linkpost for equilibria.club

Diversity and complexity - Scott E. Page.

Introduction

It is time for the first book review on Equilibria Club! The book is filled to the brim with models and ideas about diversity and complexity, each of which could normally deserve their own blog post. I will try to highlight some of the most valuable insights, especially those using economic and political examples, while still leaving enough of a cliffhanger for the interested readers.

The author's previous books, of which one is about diversity and one about complexity, may have allowed him to see the interesting relations between the two topics.

Throughout the book, various technical definitions of diversity and complexity are used. Each definition or measure captures a different aspect of our understanding. Ultimately, the author mentions various benefits which diversity offers.

Major insights

1. Diversity influences stability

The first major insight of the book is that diversity can both create and stabilize a market. The first example is both fun and enlightning - at least to my economic theorist mind:

"Imagine an exchange market—a bazaar in which people bring wheelbarrows of goods to trade. This example demonstrates how diversity can reduce volatility in a system and also produce complexity. In an exchange market, diversity can enter in three ways: (1) in what the agents bring to buy and sell, their endowments; (2) in the agents’ preferences for the different goods; and (3) in the ways the agents adapt to information, specifically prices."

"If the market had no diversity, not much would happen. If everyone had identical endowments and preferences, then no one would have any reason to trade. So, we need diversity on at least one of these dimensions just to make the market come to life. Let’s add diversity to both endowments and preferences so that agents bring different goods to market and desire different bundles of goods as well. In such a market, we need some mechanism for prices to form. Following standard economics, let’s assume that there exists a market maker, who calls out prices with the intent of producing equilibrium trades."

"Once we introduce the market maker, we have to take into account how agents respond to prices. Let’s start by assuming no diversity. If all of the agents react in the same way, then prices will be volatile. They’ll jump all ove

...
How long should I delay my second shot?
by purge — 2021-04-17T08:51:19.677Z

I got my first shot of Pfizer. They automatically scheduled my second appointment for 3 weeks later, but I canceled it, with the plan to reschedule some other time. Two reasons for this: first, while I can't unilaterally impose First Doses First, I can at least impose First Dose First--my second appointment slot was made available for someone else. Second, booster shots for other diseases are typically most effective after a longer interval.

But once vaccine supply catches up with demand, how much longer does it make sense to wait? More long-run effectiveness is good, but the booster is also more valuable while Covid is more prevalent. Eventually, vaccination will drive R below 1, even accounting for the disappearance of masks, distancing, etc. At that point, much of my protection will come from low prevalence and herd immunity rather than personal immunity anyway. There's also the possibility that Covid shots may become an annual thing like flu shots, which would also render this a short-term concern. (Or so I assume--supposing I would end up getting yet another shot later, is the timing of my second shot likely to influence the effectiveness of the third? Do memory B cells use Anki?)

In my case, it's pretty easy to continue taking strong precautions in the meantime, although my wife (who did get her second shot on schedule) will certainly appreciate when we can both go out and do things together.

[Edit: to be clear, my second appointment date had already passed before I posted this. While the other considerations raised in the comments are worth thinking about, I was specifically hoping to get some pointers to information about optimizing my own immune response, probably extrapolating from how vaccines for other diseases work since there hasn't been time to study the Covid vaccines in this much detail.]
Networks of Meaning
by Erich_Grunewald — 2021-04-17T07:30:16.012Z
Link: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/networks-of-meaning/

Nearly every piece of fiction that I have written has had at its heart an image of some simple object linking two previously separate clusters of images.[1]

– Gerald Murnane

The more things an image is joined with, the more often it springs into life.

Dem.: The more other images an image is joined with, the more causes there are by which it can be aroused.[2]

– Baruch Spinoza

Clearly, some things are meaningful to us. Some things are meaningful to me but not to you. Some other things are meaningful to you but not to anyone else on Earth. What's more, it happens that humans experience what we call revelation, where new information or a change in perspective makes previously familiar things seem newly meaningful to us.

The writer Gerald Murnane, in my view one of the greatest writers ever to live, recounts his having been brought by his wife to the opening of a contemporary art exhibition, where he is asked by the amiable organisers to take part in a panel discussion later the same evening. Being the sort of person who avoids walking into shops unless he is sure he wants to buy something (so as not to risk disappointing the shopkeeper), he accepts, though he knows nothing about contemporary art. Having accepted, he paces around the gallery, trying to think of something to say in the panel. He happens upon an artwork consisting of a handful of smooth stones scattered over the floor. The stones remind him of the fear he used to feel as a child on a rocky bay near his grandfather's farm.

I said very little during the panel discussion at the gallery, and I have no recollection of how that little was received, but I have never forgotten my satisfaction at having formulated what had been for the previous three decades of my life as a writer a sort of instinctive awareness and no more. I said, at least once, and with an image in my mind of the stones on the bare floor of the brightly lit gallery but as though they slithered beneath my bare feet in the deep shadow at one end of a sunlit, remote bay of the Southern Ocean – I said that meaning for me was connection; that a thing had meaning for me if it was connected with another thing.

[...]

Once having equated meaning with connection, I saw that the sentence, even the simplest sentence, was the form of words best able to express meaning. The simplest sentence comprises a subject, for example The stones, and a predicate

...
Are there any good ways to place a bet on RadicalXChange and/or related ideas/mechanisms taking off in a big way?  e.g. is there something to invest $$$ in? 
by David Scott Krueger (formerly: capybaralet) — 2021-04-17T06:58:42.414Z

xposted on Twitter https://twitter.com/DavidSKrueger/status/1383313776938688521