trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Blue is Arbitrary
by lsusr — 2021-03-14T09:04:30.058Z

When I was 13, the coolest thing in the world was Seto Kaiba summoning a Blue-Eyes White Dragon.

The name "Blue-Eyes White Dragon" is a translation of the Japanese "青眼の白龍".

"龍" means "dragon".

"白" means "white".

"の" turns the previous word into an adjective.

"眼" means "eyes".

"青" has no English equivalent.

The word "青" heralds back to a time before the adoption of green (緑) in the Heian period. I speculate that before the Heian period the primary colors used to be white, black, red, gold and 青. "青" is usually translated as "a color spanning blue or green". But to define "青" in terms of blue and is to contort it into a foreign ontology. We don't define "blue" as "a color spanning голубой and синий".

To us, "blue" is a singular color with an ideal RGB value around 0x0000ff.

If you asked a pre-Heian Japanese peasant to imagine the color 青 then ze wouldn't imagine the modern colors blue and green side-by-side. Ze would picture a single color. We can't look up how a pre-Heian Japanese person pictured 青 but we can look up what 青 looks like in modern Japanese by searching for it on Google.

For comparison, here are the corresponding English results for "blue".

At first glance, these colors appear similar—and they are. But, conceptually, they are derived from different things. The first (top left) image of Japanese 青 is lighter than the equivalent image of English blue. 青 is the color of the sky as seen between clouds or reflected by the ocean. "Blue" is the color of indigo dye and blue jeans. That's why we have to specify the "sky blue" variant in English. "Blue" is the color of blue pigment.

What about the Chinese 青 from which the Japanese 青 is derived?

The Chinese results for "青" are closer to turquoise than to blue AND they include images of sky and water like the Japanese results. The things associated with the color 青 are more similar between Japanese and Chinese even though the absolute value of the colors are more similar between Japanese and English. 青 is the color of nature and plants. Blue is the color of the future and pants.

I hypothesize the Japanese 青 used to be the same as the Chinese 青 but the Japanese ontology of colors drifted towards the European concept of blue due to greater cultural influences from the West.
Open loops in fiction
by Kaj_Sotala — 2021-03-14T08:50:03.948Z

A fiction-writing trick I find particularly compelling are open loops.

A cliffhanger is an example: you want to know how the hero survives, so your thoughts keep looping back to the situation, trying to figure out what happens next. But you need the author to tell you.

Really good writing uses open loops at the sentence level as well. The first sentence of the story is meaningful on its own, but also makes reference to something else; that something else is required to understand the full meaning. That sets up an open loop; I want to know more.

The following sentences provide additional context, helping close the first loop, but in so doing they make reference to other things. Even as loops are closed, new ones get opened. As the author is doing this, various characters are established. Their goals and intentions set up long-term open loops: ones that require a whole chapter or the whole story to resolve.

At any given time there may be a dozen open loops of varying timescales.

As a concrete example, let’s look at a few early sentences from the novel that prompted this thread as I started reading it and appreciating all the loops it was opening: Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince.

We open with: “Prince Zeheva squinted into the sunlight and smiled his satisfaction.”

This establishes that our character is a prince and satisfied with something that he sees. But to fully understand the situation, we need to know what he sees that satisfies him. Curious.

A somewhat different sentence would have been much less compelling: “It was a bright day, and Prince Zeheva smiled.”

This sentence would have made it sound like Zeheva was just smiling at the sunlight. He’s not actively looking at something – squinted into – and it feels like we can already understand the situation from this sentence alone. There’s no reference to something else left hanging.

Next sentence: “All the signs were good for the hunt today: claw marks on the cliffs, wing marks on the sand, and the close cropping of bittersweet plants along the canyon ridges.”

This closes the first loop – we now know what the prince was looking at that made him smile. It also opens new ones. What is he hunting, and what is going to happen next? The “claw marks” and “wing marks” suggest to me some griffin.

Notice how this sentence sets up both short- and long-term loops. The most immediate loop is “what is the prince hunting?”; that will g...
Direct effects matter!
by Aaron Bergman — 2021-03-14T04:33:11.493Z
Link: https://aaronbergman.substack.com/p/direct-effects-matter

Note: this is from my personal blog

here

.

A strange phenomenon plagues public discourse. Subtle and largely detached from the culture war, it often manages to evade detection. Can you spot it in each of the following arguments or discussion points?

Drugs like cocaine and heroin are bad. They are ruinous to users’ health, and use imposes a large negative externality on society.
We should decriminalize drugs. There is no reason to tear families apart and ruin lives for the sake of regulating consciousness.
Most American adults should exercise more. Exercise has a plethora of mental and physical health benefits, after all, and most adults are sedentary.
This expansion of unemployment insurance is bad. It creates distortionary incentives and will reduce workforce participation.

All four arguments completely ignore the first-order, direct effects of the practice in question!

Drug use and the war on drugs might impose serious costs on society, but we can’t forget that drugs themselves are fun to use! Exercise may be very important to personal wellbeing, but don’t ignore that (for some people, some of the time) exercise sucks! And we can talk about the second-order consequences of any sort of social welfare program, but let’s not neglect that the money directly improves poor people’s lives!

Saying this out loud sounds trivial, almost stupid. But I think “first-order effect neglect,” as I’ll call it, is a serious issue with public discourse.

When was the last time…

When was the last time that you heard a debate over the merits of drug legalization consider the stupidly-obvious fact that drugs make people happy? I don’t know if I ever have! Consider this list from the

first result

of my Google search for “pros and cons drug decriminalization.”

These are all valid and important points to consider, but nowhere is a mention of the most direct and obvious effect of drug use: if 10% more people smoke weed because of decriminalization, that’s a lot in chemical-induced pleasure!

Some public discussions have only a mild case of the disease. Consider Biden’s COVID relief package, as well as the larger discourse about public assistance in America. I’m sure there are better examples, but I managed to find this tweet pretty quickly.

As an observer of the online liberal-technocrat-effective altruism nexus, I see points like this made on Twitter or elsewhere from time to time. But—as the tweet...
How do you estimate how much you're going to like something?
by CTVKenney — 2021-03-14T02:33:44.782Z

Suppose you've never tried/done/seen/tasted X before. You want to predict how well you would rate/enjoy X. (X could be as small as a restaurant, or as big as a career choice.)

My knee-jerk way to approach this would be "(read about and) imagine doing X, see how much I like the thing I'm picturing, and form my prediction based on that." This approach seems to be subject to availability bias. Furthermore, this approach seems to take the inside view on prediction. For these reasons, I'm concerned that my knee-jerk approach will produce bad predictions.

On the other hand, how much you'll like something seems to depend more on 'inside' factors than whether you'll finish a project by a certain date. Does it make sense to throw out introspection entirely, and predict how much you'll like X based only on surveys/star ratings of X?
Making a Kingfisher Video
by jefftk — 2021-03-14T01:40:05.812Z

Cecilia and I recently made a

Kingfisher

video, and I
wanted to write some about the process. I'm not claiming this is the
best way to do it, and really I'm pretty sure it isn't. If people
have feedback on how to do this better or more easily, I'm definitely
interested!

We started with my parts: keyboard and drums. These are electronic
instruments, so I recorded their output directly into Audacity and
ignored the camera's audio. I normally play both simultaneously, but
here I did the drums first. That meant I only needed one camera, and
could focus on each part as I played it. The drum part was the fourth
of four takes, keyboard first of three.

I aligned the two tracks manually, made an initial mix, and sent it to
Cecilia. She sent back her main fiddle part, and an additional fiddle
part for the second half. She also recorded audio separately, for
higher quality, and made sure to align it with what I had sent her.

Now that I had all the parts, I mixed the video's audio track. I used
Audacity, since I only wanted to work with volume. We hadn't planned
any arrangement ahead of time, so we added a some that was not
originally there: the fiddle part comes in at the first A2 instead of
the beginning, the drums sit out the A1 of the third time through,
etc:

I went through many iterations by myself, and then a few more with
Cecilia. While I was working on it, the kids often would come in and
dance, and I took some video of them as well.

Once we had the final audio, I started mixing the videos. I had
initially planned to use iMovie, since it's free and comes with my
computer, but it turns out that it can only do two simultaneous video
tracks and I had five (drums, keyboard, fiddle, more fiddle, kids
dancing).

There are a lot of high quality video editors (Premiere, Pinnacle,
Final Cut, etc) but they're all expensive and this is not something I
expect to do very often. I saw some recommendations for HitFilm
Express, but when I tried it I got video glitches. It looked like
OpenShot was a good open source option, except that I couldn't get it
to play back audio and video at the same time without stuttering (2019
MBP, no other programs open, just restarted).

I decided to go back to iMovie and just mix the tracks one after
another. Aside from the workflow, the biggest downside was that I
wouldn't be able to show more than tw...
Apollo Creed problems and Clubber Lang problems -- framing, and how to address the latter?
by CraigMichael — 2021-03-14T01:29:33.414Z

If you've seen the flims Rocky I, II and III you'll be familiar with Apollo Creed and Clubber Lang, but will give a quick summary for those who haven't (spoilers ahead!). In Rocky I, Rocky (the character) is an underdog who is fighting the champion Apollo Creed. He eventually loses to Creed, but preforms so well in the fight that his status as a boxer rises and his given a re-match against Creed in Rocky II that he wins.

Rocky III (the film) begins with Rocky (the character) losing embarrassingly to Clubber Lang who he was favored to defeat. Rocky (the character) spends the rest of the film trying to overcome the psychological consequences of losing to Clubber Lang and getting his mind back in to a place where he can face Clubber Lang again and win.

I find in my own life when I'm starting something fresh and I'm interested, it's like an Apollo Creed problem. I could "win" or "lose" but so long as a I preform well, the conditions of my life improves and eventually can overcome whatever it is.

But when I've already failed at something once and then need to get back in it, there's a psychological wall that's difficult for me to overcome -- this would be like a Clubber Lang problem. Like I have more of an unconscious resistance to working on those problems. I really have to force myself to work on them, and if manage to work on them progress goes very slowly. My mind just wants to focus on like anything else it possibly can. It feels icky and demoralizing to work on them, and it's hard for me to sort out exactly why.

I would like to be better and solving Clubber Lang problems. So... two questions...

(1) Is there a better way to frame this issue? I feel like it should have been studied before and I don't have the keywords to go looking around for what has been written about it so far.

(2) If you (the reader) are or aren't aware of answers to (1), do you have insight on to this issue either from your own research or personal experience?
Strong Evidence is Common
by Mark Xu — 2021-03-13T22:04:40.538Z
Link: https://markxu.com/strong-evidence

Portions of this are taken directly from Three Things I've Learned About Bayes' Rule.

One time, someone asked me what my name was. I said, “Mark Xu.” Afterward, they probably believed my name was “Mark Xu.” I’m guessing they would have happily accepted a bet at 20:1 odds that my driver’s license would say “Mark Xu” on it.

The prior odds that someone’s name is “Mark Xu” are generously 1:1,000,000. Posterior odds of 20:1 implies that the odds ratio of me saying “Mark Xu” is 20,000,000:1, or roughly 24 bits of evidence. That’s a lot of evidence.

Seeing a Wikipedia page say “X is the capital of Y” is tremendous evidence that X is the capital of Y. Someone telling you “I can juggle” is massive evidence that they can juggle. Putting an expression into Mathematica and getting Z is enormous evidence that the expression evaluates to Z. Vast odds ratios lurk behind many encounters.

One implication of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is that is it difficult to make money on the stock market. Generously, maybe only the top 1% of traders will be profitable. How difficult is it to get into the top 1% of traders? To be 50% sure you're in the top 1%, you only need 200:1 evidence. This seemingly large odds ratio might be easy to get.

On average, people are overconfident, but 12% aren't. It only takes 50:1 evidence to conclude you are much less overconfident than average. An hour or so of calibration training and the resulting calibration plots might be enough.

Running through Bayes’ Rule explicitly might produce a bias towards middling values. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but extraordinary evidence might be more common than you think.
Quotes from the WWMoR Podcast Episode with Eliezer
by MondSemmel — 2021-03-13T21:43:41.672Z

Spoiler warning: This post contains full spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

I listened to this WWMoR podcast episode in which Eliezer had a guest appearance. I didn't see a transcript for the podcast, but found some of his replies interesting, so here is my attempt at a partial transcript.

All quotes are by Eliezer (EY), and I tried to quote him verbatim. I can't guarantee perfect accuracy (nor spelling or punctuation, for that matter), so assume that any errors are my own. That said, I provide timestamps so you can check the context for yourself if so desired.

Quotes and Excerpts

13:00 (= at the 13-minute mark)

If you'd been meant to learn from Quirrel, you would have seen Quirrel learning.

19:00

By the end of the story, Harry has taken off the Hero mask and given it to Hermione, and put on Dumbledore's mask instead.

26:00, regarding the plausibility of the scene when Harry and Quirrel escape from Azkaban on a contraption consisting of a broomstick plus a rocket:

Things out here in reality are just so much gratuitously worse than you would imagine them going if you were just going to be realistically pessimistic in a story. [...]

When I got to that part of the story, I realized that if you take a rocket and you glue it to a broomstick, you are just inevitably going to die. Like even for a story, that was too much. I couldn't make myself believe it long enough to write it down. So I had Quirrel wake up and apply a Charm of Flawless Function to the rocket and attach it to the broomstick using an actual proper spell, and then I could believe it. I could believe that would work inside a story.

Now in real life, you know, the rocket drifts off course and crashes into the walls and they all die [...].

29:00, on how the story was planned:

Primarily what was going on was that there were scenes that I was using as the anchor point, and then, knowing that these things would happen later, I could make the rest of the story be made entirely out of foreshadowing of them.

46:18

All the characters are made out of pieces of me. [...] The particular way in which Harry is made out of me is something like 18-year-old Eliezer with his wisdom and constitution scores swapped and all the brakes removed.

49:08, on Harry's and Quirrel's apparent hypercompetence:

I do not make my stories out of tropes. I make them out of subverted tropes. So there is certainly a sense in which

...
Making friends
by dominicq — 2021-03-13T19:23:29.018Z

(cross-posted from my blog)

People self-select. This means that you will naturally fall into the same kinds of circles, even if you change the environment. An example from my life comes from mixed martial arts. An MMA gym isn’t usually the most educated or the most “refined” place in town, however you define refined. It’s working class guys who like to fight, mostly. Ages vary, but the mean is around 20.

How then, did I find guys who are finishing their PhDs in biomechanics or are writing their fifth book or are tired from their shift in the hospital – how did I meet all these people at an MMA gym? They all came to the one place where you’d least expect that sort of background – and we naturally clicked together. What is really funny is how nobody even tried to click, it just happened of itself.

I don’t know if there is a “should” somewhere in here. I guess I’m just noticing that, no matter where you go or what you do, you’ll hang out with people like you. That’s a very obvious conclusion. The less obvious conclusion is that being nervous about making friends is usually misplaced. Making friends is a very non-intentional process. Some intention is necessary, but it’s not like someone comes up with a plan to build a friend group or to make a friend. You just come to do whatever you want to do, and allow yourself to participate in the natural, unmanaged process of making friends.

If you’ve made friends before, you will make the same kind of friends again. If you can come into a meathead MMA gym and find a group of PhDs who play complex polyrythmic guitar, you’ll also be able to find friends at your new workplace or in your new school. I’d say just keep at it, but there’s nothing to keep at. Do the thing you came to do and allow friendships to happen.

More often is the case of actively avoiding friendships: saying “no” to an invitation even if you want to go; not talking to people when you want to talk to them, and so on. Allowing friendships to happen is a skill, and it mostly consists of not sabotaging yourself. This is surprisingly difficult. My inner pessimist thinks that it’s almost impossible to solve for many people, because those who self-sabotage are often also dishonest with themselves. When you always have a good-sounding justification which is totally wrong, you never change because you don’t need to.

I find self-deception interesting. I assume that its m...
My attempt to find the meaning of existence
by PeterL — 2021-03-13T17:13:03.768Z

Hello, this is my first public blog post here, so I apologize for possible inappropriateness of language/style/etc.

The first of recent ideas related to the meaning of existence that comes to my mind is to achieve eternity of my life. This sounds intuitive, but it has some flaws which reside not in the first-idea notion that this might be unrealistic. So let me first explain the flaw in this idea on one side, while this will help me to modify and adjust this idea to the more sensible and more likely flawless for the meaning of existence.

The above mentioned flaw resides in this: If you should live eternally without any interruptions of your life during your eternal existence but without any awake conscious moment, would it have any meaning to you?

Or more clear dilemma is to choose between the following two scenarios:

(I) From a certain moment in future, to live eternally without any interruption, but to always sleep.

(II) From a certain moment in future, to live alternatingly with the whiles of death, but with infinite number of awake moments, or more accurately, that chronologically later than each while without awake consciousness, there would be at least one moment with it, etc.

I would choose the second scenario.

Thus, I think that the moments of awake consciousness are at least necessary features of meaningful existence, but the continuity of life is not.

But to put it more exactly, I will use the (hard-core) math (logic) to partially define the meaning of existence:

Statement 1: The necessary condition for meaningfulness of existence is that for each moment in the future (t_f), there would be at least one moment of meaningfulness sometime later than the moment t_f.

Statement 2: The necessary conditions for the moment to possess the meaningfulness are: awake consciousness; self-awareness; confidence that I am the part of the reality; confidence of own existence and the knowledge of the logic-empirical reason for this; confidence that something like reality exists and the knowledge of the logical reason for this; confidence that each subjectively apparent phenomenon has the real cause; knowledge of inconfidence of each of my unconfident knowledge; and many more…

I apologize for such seemingly ultra-hypothetical scenarios, but when you are contemplating the meaning of life, this is the natural and logical part of it.

I am curious about your reasonab...