trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Could someone please start a bright home lighting company?
by lincolnquirk — 2019-11-26T19:20:04.622Z
Link: http://www.lincolnquirk.com/2019/11/26/lumenator.html

Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office.

This idea has been shared in Less Wrong circles for a couple years. Yudkowsky wrote Inadequate Equilibria in 2017 where he and his wife invented the idea, and Raemon wrote a playbook in 2018 for how to do it yourself. Now I and at least two other friends are trying to build something similar, and I suspect there's a bigger-than-it-looks market opportunity here because it's one of those things that a lot of people would probably want, if they knew it existed and could experience it. And it's only recently become cheap enough to execute well.

Coelux makes a high-end artificial skylight which certainly looks awesome, but it costs upwards of $30k and also takes a lot of headroom in the ceiling. Can we do better for cheaper?

Brightness from first principles

First let's clear up some definitions:

Watts is a measure of power consumption, not brightness.

"Watt equivalent" brightness is usually listed for LED bulbs, at least for the standard household bulb form factor. You should generally ignore this (instead, just look at the lumens rating), because it is confusing. Normally "watt equivalent" is computed by dividing lumens by 15 or so. (bulb manufacturers like to make LED bulbs that are easy to compare, by having similar brightness to the incandescents they replace, hence "watt equivalent")

Lumens output is a measurement of an individual bulb, but says nothing about the distribution of those rays of light. For that you want to be doing math to estimate lux.

"Lux", or "luminous flux", is the measurement of how bright light is on a certain surface (such as a wall or your face). Lux is measured in lumens per square meter. Usually, your end goal when designing lighting is to create a certain amount of lux.

Direct sunlight shines 100k lux (source for these on Wikipedia)

Full daylight (indirect) is more than 10k lux

An overcast day or bright TV studio lighting is 1000 lux

Indoor office lighting is typically 500

Indoor living room at night might be only 50

Side note: This scale surprises me greatly! We usefully make use of vision with four or more orders of magnitude differences in lux within a single day. Our human vision hardware is doing a lot of work to make the world look reasonable within these vast differences of amount of light. Regardless, this post is about getting a lot

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3 Cultural Infrastructure Ideas from MAPLE
by Unreal — 2019-11-26T18:56:48.921Z

About six months ago, I moved to the Monastic Academy in Vermont. MAPLE for short.

You may have curiosities / questions about what that is and why I moved there. But I'll save that for another time.

I was having a conversation last week about some cultural infrastructure that exists at MAPLE (that I particularly appreciate), and these ideas seemed worth writing up.

Note that MAPLE is a young place, less than a decade old in its current form. So, much of it is "experimental." These ideas aren't time-tested. But my personal experience of them has been surprisingly positive, so far.

I hope you get value out of playing with these ideas in your head or even playing with various implementations of these ideas.

1. The Care Role or Care People

MAPLE loves its roles. All residents have multiple roles in the community.

Some of them are fairly straightforward and boring. E.g. someone's role is to write down the announcements made at meals and then post them on Slack later.

Some of them are like "jobs" or "titles". E.g. someone is the bookkeeper. Someone is the Executive Director.

One special role I had the honor of holding for a few months was the Care role.

The Care role's primary aim is to watch over the health and well-being of the community as a group. This includes their physical, mental, emotional, and psychological well-being.

The Care role has a few "powers."

The Care role can offer check-ins or "Care Talks" to people. So if I, in the Care role, notice someone seems to be struggling emotionally, I can say, "Hey would you like to check in at some point today?" and then schedule such a meeting. (MAPLE has a strict schedule, and this is not something people would normally be able to do during work hours, but it's something Care can do.)

People can also request Care Talks from Care.

The Care role also has the power to plan / suggest Care Days. These are Days for community bonding and are often either for relaxation or emotional processing. Some examples of Care Days we had: we went bowling; we did a bunch of Circling; we visited a nearby waterfall.

The Care role can request changes to the schedule if they believe it would benefit the group's well-being. E.g. asking for a late wake-up. (Our usual wake-up is 4:40AM!)

Ultimately though, the point of this is that it's someone&apo...
Effect of Advertising
by jefftk — 2019-11-26T14:30:02.095Z

I've recently had several conversations around whether advertising is
harmful, and specifically whether ads primarily work by tricking
people into purchasing things they don't need. One way to think about
this is, what would the world would be like if we didn't allow
advertising? No internet ads, TV ads, magazine ads, affiliate links,
sponsored posts, product placement, everything. Let's also assume that
enforcement is perfect, though of course edge cases would be very
tricky. Here's my speculation about how this would change people's
purchasing:

Products would be a lot stickier. A lot of advertising tries to
move people between competitors. Sometimes it's an explicit "here's a
way we're better" (ex: we don't charge late fees), other times it's a
more general "you should think positively of our company" (ex: we
agree with you on political issue Y). Banning ads would probably mean
higher prices (Benham 2013) since it
would be harder to compete on price.

Relatedly, it would be much harder to get many new products
started. Say a startup makes a new credit card that keeps your
purchase history private: right now a straightforward marketing
approach would be (a) show that other credit cards are doing
something their target audience doesn't like, (b) build on the
audience's sense that this isn't ok, and (c) present the new card as
a solution. Without ads they would likely still see uptake among
people who were aware of the problem and actively looking for a
solution, but mostly people would just stick with the well-known
cards.

A major way
ads work is by building brand associations: people who eat
Powdermilk Biscuits are probably Norwegian bachelor farmers, listen to
public radio, or want to signal something along those lines. Branded
products both provide something of a service, by making more ways to
signal identity, and charge for it, by being more expensive to pay for
clever ad campaigns. Without ads we would probably still have these
associations, however, and products that happened to be associated
with coveted identities would still have this role. The way these
associations would develop would be less directed, though brands would
probably still try pretty hard to influence them even without ads.
You can also choose to signal the "frugal" identity, which lets you
avoid the brand tax.

Reviewers would be much more trustworthy. There's a long

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A test for symbol grounding methods: true zero-sum games
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2019-11-26T14:15:14.776Z

Imagine there are two AIs playing a debate game. The game is zero-sum; at the end of the debate, the human judge assigns the winner, and that AI gets a +1 reward, while the other one gets a −1.

Except the game, as described, is not truly zero-sum. That is because the AI "get" a reward. How is that reward assigned? Presumably there is some automated system that, when the human presses a button, routes +1 to one AI and −1 to another. These rewards are stored as bits, somewhere "in" or around the two AIs.

Thus there are non zero-sum options: you could break into the whole network, gain control of the automated system, and route +1 to each AI - or, why not, +10100 or even +fψ(ΩΩΩ)(4) or whatnot[1].

Thus, though we can informally say that "the AIs are in a zero-sum game as to which one wins the debate", that sentence is not properly grounded in the world; it is only true as long as certain physical features of the world are maintained, features which are not mentioned in that sentence.

Symbol grounding implies possibility of zero-sum

Conversely, imagine that an AI has a utility/reward U/R which is properly grounded in the world. Then it seems that we should be able to construct an AI with utility/reward −U/−R which is also properly grounded in the world. So it seems that any good symbol grounding system should allow us to define truly zero sum games between AIs.

There are, of course, a few caveats. Aumann's agreement theorem requires unboundedly rational agents with common priors. Similarly, though properly grounded U and −U are zero-sum, the agents might not be fully zero-sum with each other, due to bounded rationality or different priors.

Indeed, it is possible to setup a situation where even unboundedly rational agents with common prior will knowingly behave in not-exactly zero-sum ways with each other; for example, you can isolate the two agents from each other, and feed them deliberately biased information.

But those caveats aside, it seems that proper symbol grounding implies that you can construct agents that are truly zero-sum towards each other.

Zero-sum implies symbols grounded?

Is this an equivalence? If two agents really do have zero sum utility or reward functions towards each other, does it mean that those functions are well grounded[2]?

It seems that it should be the case. Zero-sum between U and V=−U means that, for all possible worlds w, U(w)=−V(w). Ther

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Thoughts on implementing corrigible robust alignment
by Steven Byrnes — 2019-11-26T14:06:45.907Z

Background / Context

As context, here's an pictorial overview of (part of) AI alignment.

Starting from the top:

I split possible AGIs into those that do search/selection-type optimization towards achieving an explicitly-represented goal, and "Everything else". The latter category is diverse, and includes (1) systems with habits and inclinations (that may lead to goal-seeking behavior) but no explicit goal (e.g. today's RL systems); (2) "microscope AI" and other types of so-called "tool AI"; (3) IDA (probably?), and more. I'm all for exploring these directions, but not in this post; here I'm thinking about AGIs that have goals, know they have goals, and search for ways to achieve them. These are likely to be the most powerful class of AGIs, and were popularized in Bostrom's book Superintelligence.

Within this category, a promising type of goal is a "pointer" (in the programming sense) to human(s) achieving their goals, whatever they may be. If we can make a system with that property, then it seems that the default dangerous instrumental subgoals get replaced by nice instrumental subgoals like respecting off-switches, asking clarifying questions, and so on. In More variations on pseudo-alignment, Evan Hubinger refers to pointer-type goals as corrigible alignment in general, noting that it is only corrigible robust alignment if you're pointing at the right thing.

Out of proposed AGIs with explicit goals, most of the community's interest and ideas seem to be in the category of corrigible alignment, including CEV and CIRL. But I also included in my picture above a box for "Goals that refer directly to the world". For example, if you're a very confident moral realist who thinks that we ought to tile the universe with hedonium, then I guess you would probably want your superintelligent AGI to be programmed with that goal directly. There are also goals that are half-direct, half-corrigible, like "cure Alzheimer's while respecting human norms", which has a direct goal but a corrigible-type constraint / regularization term.

Continuing with the image above, let's move on with the corrigible alignment case—now we're in the big red box. We want the AGI to be able to take observations of one or more humans (e.g. the AGI's supervisor), and turn it into an understanding of that human, presumably involving things like their mood, beliefs, goals, habits, and so on. This understand

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Is daily caffeine consumption beneficial to productivity?
by ChristianKl — 2019-11-26T13:13:05.613Z

Caffeine raises human alertness by binding to adenosine receptors in the human brain. It prevents those receptors from binding adenosine and suppressing activity in the central nervous system.

Regular caffeine productions seems to result in the body building more adenosine receptors, but it's unclear to me whether or not the body produces enough adenosine receptors to fully cancel out the effect. Did anybody look deeper into the issue and knows the answer?
Curtis Yarvin on A Theory of Pervasive Error
by Zack_M_Davis — 2019-11-26T07:27:12.328Z
Link: https://americanmind.org/essays/the-clear-pill-part-2-of-5-a-theory-of-pervasive-error/

(Content warning: politics. Read with caution, as always.)

Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer perhaps most famous as the principal author of the Urbit decentralized server platform, expounds on a theory of how false beliefs can persist in Society, in a work of what the English philosopher N. Land characterizes as "political epistemology". Yarvin argues that the Darwinian "marketplace of ideas" in liberal democracies selects for æsthetic appeal as well as truth: in particular, the æsthetics of ambition and loyalty grant a selective advantage in memetic competition to ideas that align with state power, resulting in a potentially severe distortionary effect on Society's collective epistemology despite the lack of a centralized censor. Watch for the shout-out to Effective Altruism! (November 2019, ~8000 words)
My Anki patterns
by agentydragon — 2019-11-26T06:27:39.126Z

Cross-posted from my website.

I’ve used Anki for ~3 years, have 37k cards and did 0.5M reviews. I have learned some useful heuristics for using it effectively. I’ll borrow software engineering terminology and call heuristics for “what’s good” patterns and heuristics for “what’s bad” antipatterns. Cards with antipatterns are unnecessarily difficult to learn. I will first go over antipatterns I have noticed, and then share patterns I use, mostly to counteract the antipatterns. I will then throw in a grab-bag of things I’ve found useful to learn with Anki, and some miscellaneous tips.

Alex Vermeer’s free book Anki Essentials helped me learn how to use Anki effectively, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it. I learned at least about the concept of interference from it, but I am likely reinventing other wheels from it.

Antipatterns

Interference

Interference occurs when trying to learn two cards together is harder than learning just one of them - one card interferes with learning another one. For example, when learning languages, I often confuse words which rhyme together or have a similar meaning (e.g., “vergeblich” and “erheblich” in German).

Interference is bad, because you will keep getting those cards wrong, and Anki will keep showing them to you, which is frustrating.

Ambiguity

Ambiguity occurs when the front side of a card allows multiple answers, but the back side does not list all options. For example, if the front side of a English → German card says “great”, there are at least two acceptable answers: “großartig” and “gewaltig”.

Ambiguity is bad, because when you review an ambiguous card and give the answer the card does not expect, you need to spend mental effort figuring out: “Do I accept my answer or do I go with Again?”

You will spend this effort every time you review the card. When you (eventually, given enough time) go with Again, Anki will treat the card as lapsed for reasons that don’t track whether you are learning the facts you want to learn.

If you try to “power through” and learn ambiguous cards, you will be learning factoids that are not inherent to the material you are learning, but just accidental due to how your notes and cards represent the material. If you le...
Antimemes
by lsusr — 2019-11-26T05:58:28.954Z

Antimemes are self-keeping secrets. You can only perceive an antimeme if you already know it's there. Antimemes don't need a conspiracy to stay hidden because you can't comprehend an antimeme just by being told it exists. You can shout them to the heavens and nobody will listen. I'll try to explain with a fictitious example.

Suppose we all had an invisible organ behind our ears and our brains kept it secret from our consciousness. If I told you "you have an invisible organ behind your ear" you wouldn't believe me. You'd only believe it exists if you deduced its existence from a trail of evidence.

You can deduce the existence of an antimeme from the outline of the hole it cuts in reality. If you find an old photo with a gap where a person has been painted out then you can be confident that someone has been disappeared. You can then figure out who it is with conventional investigative methods. The challenge is noticing the gap in the first place and then not dismissing it as noise.

Different cultures have different antimemes. The more different two cultures are from each other the less their antimemes overlap. You can sweep up a mountain of antimemes just by reading a Chinese or Arabic history of civilization and comparing it to Western world history. You can snag a different set by learning what it was like to live in a hunter-gatherer or pastoralist society.

You can do the same thing with technology. Developing a proficiency in Lisp will shatter your tolerance of inferior programming languages. Once you've internalized defmacro you can never go back.

As for jobs: once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur[1].

Comprehending an antimeme takes work. You slog toward it for a long time and then eventually something clicks like a ratchet. Until then everything you've learned is reversible. After it clicks you've permanently unlocked a new level of experience, like stream entry.

Stream entry is another antimeme, by the way.

Antimemes are easily dismissed as pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is a meme, not an antimeme. You can distinguish antimemes from pseudoscience at a glance by examining why they're suppressed. Pseudoscience is dismissed as fraudulent. Antimemes are dismissed as inapposite.

There are two different kinds of entrepreneurship. The more common form of entrepreneurship is self-employment where you sell your labor. I'm not talking about this common entreprene

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Linkpost: My Fires Part 8 (Deck Guide to Jeskai Cavaliers) posted at CoolStuffInc.com
by Zvi — 2019-11-25T16:10:00.513Z

You can find it here.

Happy to respond to comments there or on my personal blog. I’m hoping this is the beginning of a great relationship with them. They’ve been my go-to for board games for a while.
Breaking Oracles: superrationality and acausal trade
by Stuart_Armstrong — 2019-11-25T10:40:18.062Z

I've always known this was the case in the back of my mind[1], but it's worth making explicit: superrationality (ie a functional UDT) and/or acausal trade will break counterfactual and low-bandwidth oracle designs.

It's actually quite easy to sketch how they would do this: a bunch of low-bandwidth Oracles would cooperate to combine to create a high-bandwidth UFAI, which would then take over and reward the Oracles by giving them maximal reward.

For counterfactual Oracles, two Oracles suffice: each one will, in their message, put the design of an UFAI that would grant the other Oracle maximal reward; this message is their trade with each other. They could put this message in the least significant part of their output, so the cost could be low.

I have suggested a method to overcome acausal trade, but that method doesn't work here; because this is not true acausal trade. The future UFAI will be able to see what the Oracles did, most likely, and this breaks my anti-acausal trade methods.

This doesn't mean that superrational Oracles will automatically try and produce UFAIs; this will depend on the details of their decision theories, their incentives, and details of the setup (including our own security precautions).

And cousin_it reminded me of it recently. ↩︎
Can you eliminate memetic scarcity, instead of fighting?
by Raemon — 2019-11-25T02:07:58.596Z

tl;dr: If you notice yourself fighting over how to tradeoff between two principles, check if you can just sidestep the problem by giving everyone tons of whatever is important to them (sometimes in a different form than they originally wanted).

Not a new concept, but easy to forget in the heat of the moment. It may be useful for people to have "easily in reach" in their toolkit for coordinating on culture.

The Parable of the Roommates

I once had a disagreement with a housemate about where to store a water-heater on the kitchen counter. The object was useful to me. It wasn't useful to them, and they preferred free-countertop space. The water-heater wasn't useful to them in part because other roommates didn't remember to refill it with water.

There was much arguing about the best use of the counter, and frustration with people who didn't refill water heaters.

At some point, we realized that the underlying issue was there wasn't enough free counterspace. Moreover, the counter had a bunch of crap on it that no one was using. We got rid of unused stuff, and then we had a gloriously vacant kitchen-counter. (Meanwhile, an option we've considered for the water-heater is to replace it with a device directly connected to the sink that always maintains boiling water, that nobody ever has to remember to refill)

Thus, an important life-lesson: Instead of solving gnarly disagreements with politics, check if you can dissolve them with abundance. This is a quite valuable lesson. But I'm mostly here to talk about a particular less-obvious application:

Memetic abundance.

Philosophical Disagreements

Oftentimes, I find myself disagreeing with others about how to run an event, or what norms to apply to a community, or what the spirit of a particular organization should be. It feels like a lot's at stake, like we're caught between a Rock and Hard Place. The other person feels like they're Destroying the Thing I care about, and I look that way to them.

Sometimes, this is because of actual irreconcilable differences.

Sometimes, this is because we don't understand each other's positions, and once we successfully explain things to each other, we both go "Ah, obviously you need both A and B."

But sometimes, A and B are both important, but we disagree on their relative importance due to deep frame differences that are hard to immediately resolve. Or, A seems worrisome

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